My Life in Poetry

By Stanton A. Coblentz

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Title: My Life in Poetry

Author: Stanton A. Coblentz

Release date: December 6, 2025 [eBook #77413]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Bookman Associates, 1959

Credits: Tom Trussel, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LIFE IN POETRY ***

My Life in Poetry

OTHER BOOKS IN THE SAME FIELD

by STANTON A. COBLENTZ

_Poetry_

THE PAGEANT OF MAN
TIME’S TRAVELERS
OUT OF MANY SONGS
FROM A WESTERN HILLTOP
GREEN VISTAS
SONGS OF THE REDWOODS
WINDS OF CHAOS
ARMAGEDDON
THE LONE ADVENTURER
SHADOWS ON A WALL
THE ENDURING FLAME
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SLEEPING MAIDEN
THE MERRY HUNT AND OTHER POEMS
SENATOR GOOSE AND OTHER RHYMES
THE THINKER AND OTHER POEMS

_Prose_

AN EDITOR LOOKS AT POETRY
THE RISE OF THE ANTI-POETS
NEW POETIC LAMPS AND OLD
MAGIC CASEMENTS
THE TRIUMPH OF THE TEAPOT POET

_Anthologies_

MODERN AMERICAN LYRICS
MODERN BRITISH LYRICS
THE MUSIC MAKERS
UNSEEN WINGS

MY
LIFE
IN
POETRY

STANTON A. COBLENTZ

BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES --:-- New York

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-14624

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
UNITED PRINTING SERVICES, INC.
NEW HAVEN, CONN.

_If I were a flutist and found the concert hall forsaken,_
_With only a few in the wide and staring rows,_
_Still I would stand and play, and keep my faith unshaken_
_That music was more than a wind that wails and goes._

Contents

_Chapter_ _Page_

Introduction 9

I “I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine” 13

II Path of Stones and Thorns 21

III Incentives and Lucky Shots 30

IV A Tale of Two Eyes 39

V Builders and Wreckers 46

VI Poetry by Prescription 52

VII A Mote in the Metropolis 62

VIII The Magic World between Covers 75

IX Blood Brother to the Epic 85

X Poets I Have Known 94

XI Shadows on a Wall 107

XII The Depression, the Sea, and the Redwoods 113

XIII Year of Miracles 122

XIV Trials and Rewards of an Editor 135

XV A Challenge to Giants 152

XVI A Recruit for Publishers’ Row 161

XVII A Place to End 172

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.

CHAPTER
ONE

“I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine”

Seated in a rocking-chair in the upper story of an old high-ceilinged
house in San Francisco’s “Western Addition,” a mild-looking,
bespectacled woman of thirty-four was reading to a boy of eight. He
followed her with an absorbed gaze as, bending her near-sighted eyes
close to the book, she let her tongue roll over the lines of _The
Children’s Hour_, _The Wreck of the Hesperus_, and other poems more
popular in a former generation than today. Years later the lines of
some of those poems--“Between the dark and the daylight,” “Grave Alice
and laughing Allegra,” etc.--were to remain in the boy’s mind.

“These are all by a man named Longfellow,” said the woman, turning to
the child with a smile. “He was a great poet and died a long time ago.”

The name impressed the boy--he thought of someone very tall and thin, a
sort of walking two-legged pole.

“Did all great poets die a long time ago, Mamma?” asked the boy.

The woman smiled again.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think we have any Longfellow today.”

At this she sighed, ever so slightly.

Instantly a resolution formed itself in the boy’s mind. Looking up with
the blissful confidence possible only to the very young, he clenched
his small fists and promised, “You wait, Mamma! You wait! When I grow
up, I’ll be a poet--just like Longfellow!”

The years were to pass, and the boy’s ambition to become Longfellow the
Second was to be forgotten amid more exciting desires: for example,
the aspiration to be the motorman of a streetcar, or, better still, a
locomotive engineer. And the woman, who had only five years remaining
of her busy life, was not to see the day when her eldest son was to
put pen to his first crude verses. But in after years the thought
was often to come to him that the poems he wrote, though hardly such
as Longfellow would have produced, would have brought her an immense
satisfaction.

Poetry was to mean little to the boy (whose identity the reader will
have guessed) during his remaining years of childhood. You might, in
fact, have judged that it never would mean anything, if you had known
how he felt about certain verses he was forced to memorize at school.
Of these, the only ones I still remember are those often-quoted lines
of Scott,

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
“This is my own, my native land,”
Whose heart within him ne’er hath burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand.

How I detested this passage! It was enough to give me a permanent
bias against Scott, and an anti-poetic impulse that might have been
lifelong. Doubtless, never having been so much as a hundred miles from
my birthplace, I was not ideally fitted to appreciate the sentiments
of a man just returning “from a foreign strand.” Besides, perhaps
my earliest bit of unconscious literary criticism was not wholly
misguided--either that, or the blind spot of childhood is still with
me, as I remain unable to warm to these lines.

A few years later, when I was thirteen and had the assignment of
writing a ballad in High School, you would have been sure that I was
a pre-destined non-poet. How I struggled with this _magnum opus_! all
the more so as I knew no more of the principles of meter than of the
laws of spherical geometry. That might not be deemed a disadvantage
nowadays, when ignorance enacts its role beneath the banners of
freedom, and when the writer daunted by form need but strike a pose,
and proclaim the merits of formlessness. But since, in those pristine
days, a ballad was expected to sound more like a ballad than like a
news report, I found myself face to face with a problem, as did all
my fellow students. I have no reason to suppose that I was any less
unsuccessful than any of the others.

How was it then that, a mere two years later, I was making spontaneous
efforts at poetry? Had this not been the beginning of a lifelong
habit--a bad habit, many will say--you might consider it but that
adolescent poetic burgeoning which marks so many youths of both sexes
before life calls them into more sober fields. Looking back, I should
say that adolescence awakens the impulses and potentialities of the
deeper self; summons out of hiding profound spiritual forces that have
no place in childhood. To me it is inconceivable that the reading at
my mother’s knee, though encouraging an interest in poetry, could have
created that interest as it was later to develop; many another child, I
feel safe in assuming, has listened to similar readings, and grown up
to be a good stockbroker, grain merchant, or realtor.

Even after all the years, it is easy for me to trace the source of my
first attempted poem. The death of my mother, a few months after I
reached thirteen, had brought me shockingly close to life’s everlasting
problems; had made it inevitable that I should wonder as to the end
and aim of existence--a problem that did not seem answered by religion
as it had been taught to me. Then one day I read some lines by Robert
Ingersoll--ringing, oratorical lines whose exact wording I no longer
recall, though the general meaning is that man is a traveler between
two great darknesses. And the result was that I burst forth into verse
which was little more than a paraphrase of Ingersoll, though not for
a moment did it occur to me that it was not original. Understanding
no more of the laws of blank verse than I had known of ballad writing
two years before, I set out boldly to wield one of the greatest and
most difficult of the English meters. While the completed product has
(fortunately) been lost, my memory retains the opening lines:

A boundless ocean of eternity
Stretches on all sides of a tiny isle.
The island is called life; the sea is death;
From its broad bosom mortal ne’er returns.

Not exactly an unusual thought, nor a distinguished expression of that
thought! But like most writers, even of the most execrable trash, I
had the illusion that my work was good--an illusion no doubt necessary
to keep up one’s spirits if more and perhaps less incompetent work is
to be produced. In any case, more work was indeed forthcoming, much
more--and I wish I could be so confident as to believe most of it less
incompetent. But for several years, I am sure, the greater part of it
was on exactly the same level of banality and unaccomplishment. Yes,
even those lines which I doted upon in my teen-aged zeal, and assumed
to be on so high a poetic plane!--

On the sunny isle of wishes,
On the mountain peaks of hope....

I could not have known that a time would come when I would blush even
to repeat this doggerel. I quote the lines now only because of the
marvelous fact--and it _does_ seem marvelous--that I should ever have
thought them good. If tastes and perceptions change with age, the ways
in which they change are sometimes a little saddening--saddening, at
least, when we observe how mistaken the clear, pure fervor of youth may
be. I am happy, in any case, to report that you would search in vain
for the rest of the masterpiece about the “sunny isle of wishes”--the
two quoted lines are the only two that somehow, perversely, have clung
to my memory, and the written copies have gone to a deserved limbo.

Ah, long and hard, and with many turns and windings, and dips no less
than rises, and devotions and heartbreaks beyond my imagining, was to
be the path that led toward poetry! But this I could not have foreseen
nor imagined in my sanguine, halcyon youth.

At this time I did not know any poet; and it did not occur to me
that I ever could know anyone so far above the plodding, commonplace
world--one of those divine creatures whom I imagined as having been
born old and gray-bearded, with a great shock of grizzled, unkempt
hair, blazing eyes, and perhaps long, trailing, patriarchal robes.
But there came a day when I would meet a poet in the flesh. And what
a disillusionment! Why, he seemed not to be beyond his twenties! And
he had no beard--in fact, not even a mustache; he talked and looked
like any ordinary man! And he had some unromantic name like Harold
Spring--or Springer, I forget exactly which. The place of our meeting
was not one of the palisades of Parnassus, but my father’s insurance
office, which he had entered not with the purpose of spreading his
wings, but of selling his book. In this he evidently succeeded, through
what arts of salesmanship I cannot imagine, since I cannot remember my
father ever investing in another book of verse, though he did have many
books of other kinds. I know that the slim volume was in our possession
for some time, and that I eagerly perused it, but all I can recall
of the contents is that there was one poem with a rousing anapestic
rhythm, in which the author, looking for a rhyme for “golden,”
ingeniously enlarged “days of old” into “days of olden”--a combination
that especially struck me, as I had never seen it before, just as I
have never encountered it since.

“Mr. Spring,” remarked my father--or maybe it was “Springer”--“says
that he is unappreciated today, but monuments will be raised to him a
hundred years after he dies.” Ah, the perennial hope of so many!--I did
not then realize the pathos of it; I was confident that the day would
come when the name of Spring--or Springer--would be honored beside
those of Keats and Tennyson.

Keats and Tennyson and Coleridge and some others, but Shelley more
than any of the rest, had spun their magic about me before I was out
of High School. I use the term “magic” advisedly; no other word so
fully conveys the enchantment I felt, the feeling of being uplifted,
illuminated, and transported to some world which was not that of our
common earth of streets and houses, but was more real, more vivid,
more radiant. Not only the thought and the imagery but the ring and
rhythms of the lines, the mellifluousness and sonorousness of the words
bewitched me. I would repeat over and over to myself passages from _The
Cloud_, or some melodious stanza like this from _To Night_:

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of thy misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--
Swift be thy flight!

With Shelley, I would have said that “I pant for the music which is
divine.” But sound effects and sorcery do not begin to express the
awards I looked for in poetry; I also sought, sought with a passionate
intensity, for something that may be called consolation. “Consolation
for what?” you will ask. That, however, is something not to be answered
as definitely as the question, “What is a brick wall?” I do not know if
the experience is a general one, but I do know that for years during
my adolescence I was obsessed with strange nostalgic longings, a vague
sadness as for something irrecoverably lost long before, a sense of
doom and of pain and parting in some far shadowy past. These feelings
were with me particularly in the loneliness that fell upon me when,
just before my seventeenth birthday, I went to live with an aunt and
uncle in Oakland while attending the University at Berkeley. Then I
would linger with relish over lines such as

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past,

and,

Rarely, rarely cometh thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?

and,

Unfathomable sea, whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!

In these serener later days, poetry of this sort has lost much of
its attraction for me; it strikes me as somewhat morbid. Moreover,
there was nothing in my life so tragic as to justify concentration
upon bleakness, sorrow, and longing. But I mention my feelings as a
psychological fact; perhaps they were merely part of the melancholy
so frequently associated with youth. Sometimes, however, I have
liked to speculate--though this can never, of course, be more than
speculation--that what I felt was a vague upsurging of recollection:
recollection of some former life of sorrow and separation, which came
dimly back to me through the mists of distance before the swift current
of years had drowned it.

My special consolation, when I was lonely or depressed, was a huge
anthology found in few homes nowadays: Bryant’s _A Library of Poetry
and Song_, an inheritance from my mother, a compilation which, issued
in 1870, and divided into sections such as “Poems of the Affections,”
“Poems of Sorrow and Adversity,” “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Peace and
War,” contained hundreds of selections from the standard poets along
with not a few by once popular but now little-remembered writers such
as Felicia Hemans and Jean Ingelow.

Over the pages of this book I would linger for hours, making new
friends and resuming acquaintance with old ones, in whom I found
a companionship of thought and mood which, especially during the
difficult period just after I left home, I did not meet anywhere in the
human world about me.

CHAPTER
TWO

Path of Stones and Thorns

Early in my apprenticeship to poetry, I was to learn that the path was
not entirely one of daisies and primroses, but was beset with stones,
thorns, and pitfalls--a tortuous trail, where you had to sweat and
strain in order to satisfy yourself even for a time.

There may be those whose inspiration needs no afterthought; who
can dash off poems with a perfection that would make revision as
superfluous as an attempt to paint the sky blue. But I have met no such
super-gifted persons, and have seen no evidence that they ever existed;
on the contrary, I have observed proof of the meticulous and often
radical revisions made by many, including Milton, Gray, Coleridge,
Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Fitzgerald and others. Possibly now
and then a poem does spring forth full-fledged, like fabled Minerva
from the head of Jove; I can even testify from experience that this
does occur, though I make no claim as to the quality of the product.
But this is the rare exception; usually the poet must labor with a
chisel. After all, the words of the English language are so many, their
combinations so innumerable, the shades and nuances of thought so
varied, and the possibilities of technical adjustments and figurative
embellishments so rich! Surely, only by a rare intuitive stroke could
a poet immediately pick the truest and best phrasing! The original
impulse, which may be too urgent to allow the writer to debate with
himself over the sound of a syllable or the choice of an adjective
before the thought has been caught on paper, would not be well-served
if the poet strove for instant perfection. Let the essence of the poem
be caged in words before its fragile and delicate substance vanishes;
then let the details be strengthened, rearranged, and purified.

To be sure, I may smile now to recall how zealously I toiled to improve
lines that not even the genius of a Milton could have redeemed from
the waste basket. I may smile, also, to think of the epic in heroic
couplets, which, sometime during my High School days, I started
to confide to a notebook; it had a fabulous Spenserian theme, as
allegorical as _The Faerie Queene_, and eventually met its deserts,
and was lost to sight. Similarly, I may smile to think of the still
longer poem on which I embarked somewhat later, under the egregious
title, _The Key to the Universe_--which will doubtless sound as funny
to the reader as it does to me today, though it was not actually so
presumptuous as the wording might indicate. I really did not imagine
that I had the key to the universe; on the contrary, I was impressed
then, as today, by the fathomless and awesome mystery of all created
things; and in pursuance of this feeling of wonder and bewilderment,
the poem dealt with a man who merely _sought_ the objective mentioned
in the title. I recall that I wrote this would-be masterpiece during
one of my summer school vacations: in the heat of the Stockton days,
when 100 degrees in the shade was not unusual, creative work was
impossible; and therefore, in order to find the necessary coolness as
well as uninterrupted quiet, I would go at about seven every morning
to my father’s office on the fifth floor of a downtown building, where
I would be undisturbed until his arrival at eight-thirty or nine--at
which time, creation would end. But by then I had ordinarily completed
about fifty lines of blank verse, which I would revise later in the day.

So far as I am aware, no eyes but mine have ever glanced at _The Key
to the Universe_, which occupied me all of one summer. It was not that
I was exceptionally secretive; it was that I had discovered that few
people in this matter-of-fact world, even among those closest to one,
are interested in seeing poems, and especially long poems, unless out
of curiosity, or because they are impressed by something quite apart
from the work itself, such as the prospect of gain, or the trailing
effulgence of some chance honor. Like everyone, I want to have my work
read and appreciated; but in my later years, as in my earlier, I have
found the writing of poetry a lonely, a very lonely task; in my later
years, as in my earlier, I have never shown my work to anyone who did
not ask to see it (my wife and editors alone excepted); and it rarely
happens that anyone does ask to see it.

When just under seventeen, I saw the first glimmerings of what looked
to me like success. I say “looked” like success, for appearances are
more illusory than I, in my juvenile ardor, could have realized.
An essay in rhymed couplets, entered in a state-wide contest for
High School students, won me a free trip to the Yosemite Valley (a
trip which, for reasons I need not enter into here, I was unable to
take); and this was the more extraordinary since I had never seen the
Yosemite, although I wrote in glowing terms about “this masterpiece
of nature’s art.” The prize-winning offering, so far as I can recall
it, was an execrable concoction in which words like “grand,” “superb,”
“majestic,” “splendid,” and “magnificent” took the place of poetry; but
I was elated at the recognition, and did not realize that recognition
of itself is a bubble, prizes are bubbles, and are apt in the end to
mock you, unless your work itself is good--in which case you need no
prizes.

Nevertheless, that prize did give a spur to my spirits and at the
same time it offered my father and others about me their first faint
hope that perhaps after all the young scapegrace of a poet was not
altogether a squanderer of time. But I doubt whether it had any more
effect than an April shower upon my future.

This was, indeed, the only encouragement I was to have for a long, long
time. Instead, I took my tuition in the form of slaps in the face.
One of the hardest came during my second year in college, when for
the first time I did meet a real poet--Leonard Bacon, a tall, waggish
reed of a man, then much less known than later, though he had some
real poetry to his name, and was available where you could actually
see and talk with him; in fact, he was a member of the staff of the
English Department. Even if he was no older and no more bearded than my
one-time acquaintance Mr. Spring (or Springer), I had by now lost some
of my romantic ideas as to the required looks of poets. What I did have
was a high aspiration to enter Bacon’s class in verse-writing, a class
limited to fifteen members. With unabashed temerity, I submitted what I
regarded as my best poems--in all probability, my most bombastic; and
confidently awaited the word of the great man. In due time, this word
came--and like unexpected thunder, it left me stunned. I was refused!
This in itself would have been devastating enough; but still worse was
Mr. Bacon’s comment when he returned my manuscripts. “If you want to
write soporifics for the entertainment of your friends, by all means go
on. Otherwise, I’d advise you to turn to some other line of work.”

This advice, like much other good counsel I have received, was not
taken; and a time was to come, as we shall see, when Mr. Bacon would
soften his verdict. Looking back today, however, I cannot doubt that
his opinion was justified by the possibly facile but quite unillumined
verses I had submitted. But at the time, his decree pounded me like a
sledgehammer. Had it not been that even sledgehammers could not break
my tie to poetry, I might truly have turned to some less difficult
subject, like mathematics or astrophysics.

Other blows also were in store for me. In the beginning, I had written
just in order to write--in order to fulfill some vague and nameless
but powerful impulse, which caused me to take strange satisfaction in
smooth-flowing words and lines and in the rhythmical expression of the
thoughts surging over me. To write was enough! The possible fate of the
output was something I did not even consider. But in time a new element
was to be injected. And the date, as nearly as I can place it, was
sometime after my eighteenth birthday.

At the beginning of the second semester of my second college year, a
great change came into my life. To an outsider, the difference would
have seemed a routine one; yet it was as if the fabled magic carpet
had taken me to new continents on that day when I left my uncle and
aunt in Oakland, and came to live in Berkeley, where I shared a room
and sleeping porch with my cousin Stanley. Stanley, a clever and
kindly youth about three and a half years my senior (now a lawyer in
Los Angeles) had something of a penchant for leadership; and one of
the ways in which this penchant manifested itself was in connection
with my poetry. Now I have no reason to suppose that he had then,
or at any time, any interest whatever in poetry as such; but he did
show an interest in _my_ poetry, at least to the extent of trying
to market it. What he did was to constitute himself, in a sense, my
literary agent, though I doubt if either of us had ever heard this
term. I typed out the poems (having just received from my father the
gift of a reconditioned typewriter, for which I was more grateful than
if it had been the wealth of Croesus). And Stanley compiled a list
of periodicals, and sent my none-too-skillful typescripts to most
of the leaders of the day: the _Atlantic_, _Scribners_, _Harpers_,
the _Century_, the _North American Review_, the _Forum_, and other
magazines, many of them now long departed from this mortal life.

With the publication fever thus aroused, I eagerly awaited the results.
Poor deluded hopeful! I did not yet know that even with the most
accomplished work, and the arduous labors of a practiced hand, the road
to editorial favor is often long, sinuous, and spiny. And with verse as
amateurish as mine--well, the outcome was inevitable. When my treasures
started coming back, I was disappointed, and disappointed again, and
disappointed once more, and so on and on, scores of times. I could not
believe that the editors, _all editors_, were too shortsighted to see
the merits so luminously evident to me. To be sure, their printed slips
were invariably worded politely: they “had had pleasure in reading the
submissions,” rejection “did not necessarily imply any lack of merit,”
and the author was thanked for “his courtesy” in permitting the editors
to turn down his work. Sometimes the rejection slips even invited
further submissions--with the result that I would acquire duplicate
slips, soliciting still further submissions. But not a single penned or
pencilled line suggested that editors were human! I began to doubt if
they were.

What Stanley thought of the debacle I do not know; in the end, when he
saw that his efforts brought nothing but a waste of time and postage
stamps, he probably told himself that his verse-writing cousin would
do well to cease his scribblings and settle down to some good, solid
occupation, like that of a schoolteacher or a filing clerk.

Still, to my own way of thinking, the score was not quite absolute
zero. One of the final submissions did bring me a ray of hope. No,
more than a ray! a blaze! The poems, submitted to a Boston literary
magazine, came back exactly in the way of their predecessors, but
this was not because they were not good--oh, not at all, said the
glowing letter that accompanied them, on an imposing letterhead,
with a subheading that particularly impressed me, _Books in Belles
Lettres_. The return of my “splendid poems” was greatly regretted by
Mr. Scottfield, the editor, and was due only to the unhappy fact that
he was overstocked. However, if I had poems enough to make a book, he
would be glad to recommend the manuscript to the consideration of the
other editors associated with him in The Poet-Craft Publishing Company.

The fact that I had never heard before of the Poet-Craft Publishing
Company made no difference whatever. I pictured it as an immense
concern, occupying the whole of some noble building in downtown Boston,
where a learned knot of editors and scores of able assistants were
devoted to the uplifting task of giving poetry to the world.

Riding cloud-high on the wings of such thoughts, I let my eyes range
again and again over those magical lines. If I had poems enough to
make a book! To think that my work was wanted by that great publishing
house, the Poet-Craft Company! So then all the editors who had returned
my work had been wrong! Of course! I had known that from the beginning!
And now those eminent authorities at Poet-Craft would prove it by
publishing my book! That they actually would publish it I did not
doubt--all that was necessary was for me to pick out my best, and send
them to Mr. Scottfield.

Having dispatched the manuscript, which contained most of the poems
that Stanley had sent out with such unanimous lack of success, I could
hardly wait for the letter that would tell me when Mr. Scottfield would
publish the book. But the suspense was not to be long, considering that
there were no air mails in those days. Hardly two weeks had passed
before the postman delivered a long blue envelope whose upper left-hand
corner bore that enchanted inscription, _The Poet-Craft Publishing
Company_. My fingers trembled as, during that breathless instant, I
tore open the envelope.

The first lines brought me a thrill: Mr. Scottfield was “delighted”
with my poems! His fellow editors agreed with him in recommending
publication. The book would be printed on a “special laid paper” and
bound in “antique boards.” (I had, to be sure, no idea what laid
paper or antique boards might be, but they sounded magnificent.) A
publication date could be set almost immediately, and I would have
proofs in a few weeks, dependent, however, upon one small condition.

By the time I had read this far, my pulse was beating fast, but my
heart was beginning to sink. The “one small condition” did not look
small to me: it was that I must forward to Mr. Scottfield “the nominal
sum of $575.”

He might as well have asked “the nominal sum” of five hundred and
seventy-five millions. Not that I would not have paid the money, and
eagerly, if I had had it; but in my impecunious student’s life, in
which a dollar looked as large as a pumpkin, an item of five or six
hundred dollars surpassed my wildest dreams of wealth. Some fantastic
ideas did, indeed, flit through my head: I might borrow the money.
But nobody whom I knew had that much money to lend, except possibly a
certain uncle, who ran a retail clothing store and was regarded as the
rich man of the family. However, he was not known to be so free-handed
as to throw money away (which, I had just sense enough to realize,
would be how he would look upon the proposed investment). No, I had
nowhere to turn, nowhere at all! I must give up the dream--my book
would never be published, on laid paper and with antique boards, by
that distinguished concern, the Poet-Craft Publishing Company!

Little did I realize the shoals I was avoiding! I have often thought
how unfortunate it would have been if some obliging relative, with
more money than literary judgment, had come forward to provide Mr.
Scottfield with the requested sum. Surely, it would not have been easy
to live down the appearance between boards (even antique boards!) of
the _juvenilia_ that I regarded as poetry.

CHAPTER
THREE

Incentives and Lucky Shots

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:

I saw an army of the newly dead
Come stalking by like clouds before the blast.
More numerous than autumn leaves they passed,
With War, their slayer, marching at their head.

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:

Blest is this day, past any other day
The world has ever seen; yet must we pray
The world hereafter may so blesséd be
Never another day like this to see.

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.

CHAPTER
FOUR

A Tale of Two Eyes

While I was still at college, a situation arose which would affect
my whole life, and would cast its reflections across my writing and
particularly over my poetry. It is something that I hesitate to speak
of, as I tend to squirm at recitals of personal ailments, in which
there may be an element either of morbidness or of self-pity, if not
of both. However, in this case the facts must be told if the story is
to be kept in perspective. While in most ways I have been blessed with
excellent health all my life, in one respect the record has been less
than perfect: with regard to my eyes. Indeed, the facts have, I can say
without exaggeration, been unusual.

Multitudes, particularly among students, are known to suffer from
optical complaints; therefore, when my eyes began to bother me I had
no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary. There had, it is
true, been some disagreement among specialists as to the source of
the complaint: one had prescribed glasses for far-sightedness, and
another had, confusingly, ordered lenses for near-sightedness. But the
disturbances did not become acute until my first graduate year, when,
at my father’s urging, I was studying law (which I was to abandon
with a sigh of relief that I can almost hear even now). I would have
the alarming experience of walking down a street at night and seeing
a lamp-post split into two. Or I would stare at a man, and he would
divide into twins. True, the twins would always be reassociated, after
some queer shifting, wavering, and dancing. No! do not suspect that I
had been drinking; my headiest beverage was milk. The gift of double
sight was, however, annoying, though perhaps little more than annoying;
what was more alarming was that, at the same time, I was developing an
inability to do close work. Pains would shoot through my eyeballs; the
muscles would quiver and flicker and refuse to focus on the page; there
came a time when I could not so much as glance at the morning paper.
College work was, of course, now out of the question, though by special
dispensation I was permitted to take my examinations on the typewriter,
which I could use with but little eye-strain.

Several oculists, consulted in swift succession, attempted different
remedies. One did the obvious, and prescribed new glasses; another
ordered eye exercises; a third recommended prisms--lenses of a special
type, which, I was told, would act as crutches for my eyes. But nothing
was of any avail. During an entire summer, since I could not read, I
worked at my father’s behest as a life insurance agent (a vocation for
which I showed an incapacity that was all but total, though I did have
many delightful conversations with interesting people, none of whom had
any intention whatever of ordering policies). When the summer was over,
and my eyes gave more cause for concern than ever, a Stockton physician
told my father of a specialist in San Francisco who might help me. And
thus it came about that, accompanied by my parent, I paid my first
visit to Dr. O (whose full name I withhold, for reasons that will soon
be apparent).

Dr. O was a square-faced, beefy-cheeked man of about forty, who wore
glasses, just like every other eye doctor I have ever seen. He lost
no time in diagnosing my case, and appalled me with the announcement,
“Young man, you are suffering from exophoria.”

“X O what?” I asked, my heart sinking.

“Exophoria. It’s what the man on the street knows as being wall-eyed.”

In other words, my eyes were not working together; they were diverging
from each other, or turning outward, and at times each formed a
separate image, which accounted for my seeing double. But what was the
remedy? There was only one possibility, unless I wished the malady to
get worse and worse until I had virtually lost the use of one eye. The
cure--which should be applied as soon as possible--was an operation
or series of operations to draw the muscles together; for this Dr. O
had developed a special technique, which he often applied with entire
success.

The prospect of getting back the full use of my eyes, the hope of being
able to read again, was something for which I would have pawned my
future, if anyone would have put up money on so doubtful a commodity.
And so, after some deliberation, Dr. O was commissioned to perform the
operations.

I need not go into the details. The first of the series was scheduled
at a hospital, to which I hopefully walked one morning after a hearty
breakfast (no one had advised me that the very worst thing to do before
an operation is to eat, or that the resulting digestive disturbances
would cause me more distress than the after-symptoms of the incision
itself). During the operation something seemed to go wrong, or it may
be that the local anaesthetic was not far-reaching enough, for at one
point it felt exactly as if the surgeon was trying to pull off the
top of my head. However, this was but a momentary sensation; finally,
to my vast relief, the operation was over; and subsequently two other
operations were carried out, one of them a minor one, performed at Dr.
O’s office.

In general, as I can thankfully testify, Dr. O did achieve his
objective. The “exophoria” was sharply reduced; the long hoped-for,
long-coveted time did arrive when I could once more concentrate on
a book. But just at this point fate, with sly secret wiles, had her
little trick in store for me.

As I sat in a college classroom not long after the bandages of the last
operation were removed, the frosted lamps above began to hurt my eyes.
Yet these lights were not particularly bright; they were, in fact, of
a kind I had long been used to and had never noticed before. This was
my first intimation that my eyes could no longer endure direct exposure
to ordinary artificial light. But the knowledge was to grow upon me
in the days and months that followed. Somewhere, somehow, something
had gone wrong in one of the operations; Dr. O had cut too deeply into
the muscles; had ruined their delicate natural balance, and impaired
forever their accommodation to light and motion.

This was proved not only by the marked new sensitiveness to light; it
was shown by the fact that my eyes could not adjust to rapid movements,
as of a bird darting before my face; while light in motion, and
especially flickering light, could cause me acute pain. It may seem
strange to those who have not had the experience, but I have never
since been able to see a match struck half a block away without a
prick of pain; no one (unless I am forewarned and have closed my eyes)
can switch on a light, nor pull a shade up or down without making it
feel as if little hands tear and clutch at my eye-muscles; flickering
candles at a dinner party may cause me pain in the eyeballs and
partial inability to use my eyes for as much as two weeks; the spurt
of a flashlight or the glare of automobile headlamps may stab me like
daggers; while bright lights of any kind are a torture. Thus, though
I lived in New York for years, I avoided all artificially illuminated
streets whenever possible, and my definition of hell was Broadway at
night--this was, indeed, not the least of my reasons for exchanging New
York in 1938 for the wood-lanes of a small California suburban town.

A recent incident may illustrate my predicament. Not long ago I
attended a writers’ conference, which opened with a panel discussion
in which I was expected to participate. But upon reaching the
discussion room, I found it dominated from above by a flood-light like
a locomotive headlamp, making it impossible for me to enter. My wife
Flora, therefore, stepped in where I could not tread, and tried to
explain the situation to the hostess; but the latter (like most people)
failed to understand, and made no offer to dim the quite superfluous
glare. Hence I had no choice but to absent myself from the meeting
which I had come two thousand miles to attend.

Other incidents in a similar vein come back to mind. I remember,
for example, the case of the usually considerate old lady who (at
considerable cost to my eyes) decided to keep a purely ornamental blaze
burning in her fireplace because “otherwise the fuel would be wasted.”
Likewise, there was the case of the lady, a friend of many years’
standing, who had invited Flora and me to a Christmas Eve party, and
who--though she well knew the state of my eyes--had decorated the table
with lighted candles. I made no comment or request; but as we sat down
at the table, I adjusted a pair of dark glasses, which would reduce
though they would not eliminate the irritation. At this the hostess
turned to me defensively. “Sorry, Stanton, you’ll have to get used to
those candles. We just can’t put them out--it wouldn’t be the Christmas
spirit.” I had occasion to wonder about her idea of the Christmas
spirit during long subsequent evenings when I lay with closed eyes in a
dark room.

Still another case--not injurious to my eyes, though it did not leave
me quite unruffled--was that of the old friends, the Grillers, who had
invited Flora and me to their home for the evening. All went well until
Mary Griller remembered some moving pictures of last summer’s vacation
trip. “I know Stanton can’t look at them,” she said, regretfully,
“but I’m sure he wouldn’t want to deprive Flora of the opportunity.”
Being foolishly polite, I admitted that I was not such a brute as
to deny Flora anything so precious (she afterwards confessed to me
that she could have missed the pictures without loss). The hostess
then led me out to the only available room, the kitchen. And there,
without even a book or paper to help while away the time, I passed a
somewhat-less-than-sociable hour, in company with the colored maid, who
glowered at me as if resenting this invasion of her private terrain,
or as if wondering what offense I had committed to subject me to this
peculiar punishment.

But did I make no efforts to overcome the ailment? Ah, yes, I made many
efforts; eye specialists on both coasts have tried remedies, tests, and
drugs without stint--and without success. Long ago, I resigned myself
to the fact that the condition is one I must live with, though it has
altered my life in little ways and great. It is a mere trifle that my
house, unlike most others in the area, must do without a fireplace;
it is likewise of no importance, though occasionally a source of
embarrassment compelling my temporary withdrawal from a company, that
I have been unable to face photographers’ flashlights. I do not too
greatly regret that, for me, motion pictures and television are out of
the question; nor that my inability to face headlights and sun-flashes
has made it inadvisable to drive a car--though in the suburban town
where I have lived ever since 1938 and where even the most impecunious
family has at least one broken-down four-wheeler and most have two or
three, the lack of a car is regarded, if not as a proof of miserliness,
at least as an eccentricity that no one but a poet would commit.

However, these are mere minor deprivations. I have sometimes more
deeply regretted the fact that I can go out at night only very
sparingly, if at all; and that I am debarred from many literary and
other gatherings. This has, inevitably, cut down my connections and
contacts, and may even give the false impression that I am anti-social.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, has seemed of any importance beside
the fact that my eyes, with all their impairments, have served and
are still serving my main life-purpose; for this I have been deeply
thankful.

Moreover, I sometimes wonder if the balance is not on the positive
side. I wonder if some overseeing power, planning to keep me on the
track of my major interests and make it impossible to yield to frequent
diversions, could have devised a more serviceable disability than mine.
Many a night, lying in the dark in order to rest my eyes, perhaps
listening to the soft music drifting to me from the phonograph or tape
recorder, I have meditated on matters that have given rise to poems,
poems I might not otherwise have written. And those poems have been
created without the use of eyes, since I developed long ago an ability
to compose as much as two sonnets in my mind without putting any word
on paper, and can even revise the stanzas, which in many cases have not
been jotted down until the next day.

And so it may be that that error, that unnoticed slip of the knife made
long ago by Dr. O, has been my poetic salvation.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Builders and Wreckers

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_:

Now whether they realize it or not the _vers librists_ are
perpetrating a tremendous joke. There is nothing they cannot stamp
as poetry so long as they give it a “jagged appearance”; they have
taken singularity of form as the chief poetic criterion, and there
are many who accept this criterion without even a smile. I confess
that it does not make all the difference in the world what a thing
is called; that literature will not come to an end if we entitle
prose poetry, and that the songs of Burns and the sonnets of Keats
will survive unaffected even by the “polyphonic prose” of Amy Lowell
and the imagistic ebullitions of Ezra Pound. Yet if a hoax is being
perpetrated, I believe in exposing that hoax; and if a group of
poetic charlatans are drawing attention to themselves by juggling
cleverly with words, I consider it right to say that they are
charlatans. And it seems that a whole school of poets is imitating
on a larger scale the “Spectric Poems” of Mr. Bynner and Mr. Ficke,
which were issued as a joke, and seriously commended by the critics.

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:

&(all during the

dropsin
king god my sic
kly a thingish o crash dis
appearing con ter fusion ror collap
sing thatthis is whichwhat uell itfull o
f cringewiltdrollery i
mean really th
underscream of sudde
nly perishing eagerly everyw...

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:

O prince of hyphenated poets!
O neutral between poesy and prose!

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.

CHAPTER
SIX

Poetry by Prescription

When the Spring semester of 1919 had been followed by the fleeting
Summer Session, I remembered my interview with Edmond Coblentz of the
_Examiner_ and his invitation to see him again.

By way of equipment, I armed myself with a sequence of short poems
which I had been writing--at least, I may call them poems by courtesy,
though “satirical rhymes” would be a more appropriate designation. They
were all based on animals, birds, fishes, or insects: one, for example,
told of a “chimpanzee of science,” who expressed the belief that the
apes were descended from mankind, and provoked “sneers and jeers and
hoots” from his hearers, who did not wish to consider themselves the
offspring of brutes. Another, no less in a vein of mockery, described a
mole who had gained his eyesight, frolicked in the sun, and shouted to
his fellows to join him, since it was good to have one’s sight. However,

The other moles responded,
“Your theories are unsound.
There is no sun or moon, for none
Have seen them underground!”

The mole with eyesight therefore suffered the penalty for seeing too
well; was put in jail, tried, and hung.

I do not know if these particular two offerings were among those which
I showed to “Cobby” on that memorable second visit to the _Examiner_,
but I do know that he seemed impressed by the ones I did show him.

“You say you have others like these?” he asked, bending toward me
across his paper-strewn desk with an affable smile.

“About a hundred and fifty.”

His smile broadened. “Well, that’s a few too many for the present. But
if you want to pick out twenty or thirty of the best, I’ll take time to
look them over. When did you say you’re through college?”

“A week from Friday.”

“Well, step in here a week from Monday, at one o’clock, if you’d like
to start work with us. Your salary, to begin with, will be twenty a
week.”

I started to murmur my acceptance, my gratitude. But he had arisen; had
cut me short with a hasty gesture; and had turned to receive a gaunt,
bespectacled man, who, wearing a green eyeshade, and with a pencil
cocked across one ear at the angle of a badly listing vessel, entered
in rolled-up shirtsleeves and with suspenders showing from beneath his
open vest, and waved a paper at “Cobby” as excitedly as one who has
just discovered that the city is afire.

During the next week or two, I spent all my spare time selecting about
thirty of my too-numerous animal satires; resisting the temptations
of the tennis courts during the daylight-saving hours of the long
summer evenings, I sat studiously typing out the chosen pieces. These
I brought to “Cobby” when I began my new duties; and he took them with
a noncommital grunt, but perhaps not with entire dissatisfaction, for
during the next several months fifteen of them were to appear in the
paper, with illustrations and a display two or three columns wide,
beneath the caption--which I had no part of choosing--“Think it over!”

At this point, coincidence appeared very long-armed indeed. Many
readers of the paper, on seeing these verses, chose to regard “Stanton
A. Coblentz” not as a real person, but as a synthetic individual,
formed by the collaboration of Managing Editor Edmond Coblentz with the
publisher, whose surname happened to be “Stanton”--as for the “A.,” it
was neatly accounted for as representing the “and” which linked the two.

Meanwhile, at regular intervals, the paper was printing other verses
under the same confusing byline. I say “verses,” for though they
looked like poems, it would be an unjustified exaggeration to call
them that. As the clippings have long ago slipped into limbo, I can
offer no documentary proof; and I can hardly think my obsolete doggerel
would justify the labors of research required by a search of the old
newspaper files. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I came as near to
writing poems as most persons could have done; but the circumstances
were not exactly propitious.

“Coblentz,” City Editor Hines would bawl, glaring at me where I sat in
the City Room five or six rows of typewriters away, “here’s an item
for you!” Knowing that haste was of the essence of discretion, I would
hurry to Hines’ desk. And he would point to something in the day’s
news--perhaps a sentimental note about a memorial to some war mothers,
or perhaps a report in lighter vein, that a burglar alarm had been
rung, and the police, upon arriving breathlessly, had found the culprit
to be a stray dog who had wandered in through an open rear door. “Write
me a poem on this, Coblentz!” he would prescribe, somewhat as he might
say to a carpenter, “Build me a work-bench!”, or to a cook, “Make me
some hash!” Not for a moment did he seem to doubt that the prescription
would be filled.

And in all cases, the prescription _was_ filled, though I am not
saying how well. Rhyme and meter were, assuredly, supplied; and I
tried as well as I could to turn on the required sentiments, whether
of awe or pity, applause or comedy. Under any circumstances, this
would have been difficult if not impossible, at a moment’s notice,
and with the finished product demanded the same afternoon; but in the
frantic atmosphere of a newspaper office, to the accompaniment of
clicking typewriter keys, shouts and calls and laughter, shuffling of
hasty feet, telephone bells and fire alarms, it demanded a feat of
concentration which, I fear, I would be unable to duplicate now.

Even in those budding days, despite the pleasure I took in my frequent
appearances in print, I perceived the dangers of my position--a
position in which my occasional reporting duties were subordinate to my
specialty of writing verses on demand. I was not ungrateful for my job;
I realized that I had, in fact, a privileged position, for how many
youths just out of college are given an opportunity to make a living
by weaving rhymes together? Nevertheless, this verse-writing to order,
if long continued, could be deadening, stultifying; one might become
little more than a poetic hack, a rhyme-machine.

At about this time, I was receiving other encouragements--slight ones,
but enough to give me a real spur and stimulus. At last, after the
many rejections, various poems had been accepted by different media:
two by _Sunset_, then a general magazine; one or two more by the New
York _Times_; and several by _Judge_ and _Life_, both of them leading
national magazines of humor (the latter unrelated to the present
periodical of the same name). Also, an article on poetry had been taken
by the university quarterly, _The Texas Review_ (now long defunct), and
the new-born magazine _True Stories_ had sent me a check for one of my
narratives. With these and one or two other marks of favor from the
editorial gods, I began thinking of wider fields.

But perhaps I was becoming too confident. I had not yet learned that
most permanence is in appearance only; I did not foresee that my
position with the _Examiner_, if I desired, might not be forever. A
raise in salary to a princely twenty-five a week had assured me that my
employers were not dissatisfied with my performance; and it may be that
except for something quite extraneous--a by-product of the late war,
in the nature of a paper shortage, which cut down the space available
for newspaper features--I could have continued turning out custom-made
poems for the _Examiner_ as long as I chose, which surely would not
have been forever.

In any case, the serenity of one blue day was shattered by an
unexpected blow. An innocent-looking little note informed me that my
continued services were not required.

“Ah well,” I philosophized, “I suppose one goes through life as on a
long stairway, first up two steps, then down one, or maybe even two or
three. Now I’ll have to set about to climb again.”

My situation was far from desperate: I had saved a little money, and
was still making a little from the book reviews which I continued to
contribute to the _Argonaut_, at a gratifying five dollars a column.
The question now was to find another job, at least temporarily. For
some weeks I had a position on the _Call_, as editor in a limerick
contest, until my eyes gave out beneath the reading of thousands of
daily submissions--I mean, literally, thousands!--and I had no choice
except to resign. I have sometimes thought that, except for the state
of my eyes, this would have led to a permanent connection; but perhaps
it is well that it did not, for this might have held out attractions
that would have trapped me in San Francisco, when the route of destiny
lay elsewhere.

But in San Francisco or its vicinity I must remain until I could see
my path more clearly. And since the literary opportunities there were
strictly limited, it is not surprising that my footsteps led me to the
doors of that once-popular but now decrepit magazine, _The Overland
Monthly_, which had boasted the work of Bret Harte, Jack London, Mark
Twain, and many another notable, and which continued publication as
if by force of habit, though now little more than the ghost of its
old-time self.

The office of the _Overland_, significantly, was located in a back
street half blocked with great drays and trucks, and much less redolent
of the odor of printers’ ink than of brewing and manufacturing. And
there I had a successful interview with the editor, a portly Irishman
whom I may call Finnegan, a man of sixty-seven or sixty-eight, with a
round bespectacled face that was perpetually red. There was something I
immediately liked about him, though his slouching ungainly figure, with
the frayed collar and soiled shirt, did not conform to my notions of
how an eminent editor should look.

I began, tentatively, by showing him a poem--or rather, a rhymed satire
on a political theme. And he liked it well enough to accept it on
the spot--which surprised me less when I came to know more about the
magazine, and learned how little in the way of worthwhile material
it ordinarily received. What was most astonishing was that Finnegan
eventually let me have five dollars for the poem.

After this encouraging start, I went on to divulge my principal reason
for visiting him.

“Oh, so it’s work you’re looking for, is it?” he demanded, running a
set of gnarled stubby fingers through the scanty remnants of his gray
hair. “Well, young man, there’s lots better places to look than here.
Why don’t you go somewhere where they pay wages?”

“Don’t you pay wages?”

His owlish, inflamed eyes looked out at me half seriously, half
humorously from their sunken sockets.

“Pay wages, young man? Now you’re expecting too much. Do you think I’d
be staying here myself if I could get a job anywhere else?”

“But you’re the editor!”

“Sure I’m the editor! Also, managing editor, assistant editor, chief
make-up man, manuscript reader, proofreader, stenographer, and office
boy. I don’t have one job, young man. I have a dozen.”

“In that case,” I contended, seeing my opportunity, “you need someone
to take part of the burden off your shoulders.”

He fumbled unconsciously at his left shoulder, where there was a
conspicuous rip in his coat.

“Right you are, young man! I could use half a dozen to take the burden
off my shoulders. There’s only one trouble. People in this town don’t
like working without wages.”

“Surely, you could pay something.”

“Our something would be almost nothing.”

“How much, for example?”

His eyes wrinkled together and narrowed, and he stared at me in
silence, as if debating with himself. Several seconds passed ...
then, with an air of a man proposing the magnificent, he announced,
“Well, all we could afford would be afternoons only, at two dollars a
half-day.”

“Two dollars? But you couldn’t expect a man to live on that!”

“Just what I’m telling you,” he agreed, turning back to the huge shears
and pastepot on his untidy, paper-strewn desk. “I’d advise you not to
take it.”

“Maybe it’s good advice, but I don’t intend to follow it,” I decided,
with a smile.

And thus I made my connection with the _Overland_, and simultaneously
with the _News Letter_, a local weekly published under the same
management, and for which I served as dramatic critic, copy reader, and
general office hand.

In part my tasks were connected with poetry, since in my capacity as
chief manuscript reader I had the duty of picking any acceptable verses
as well as acceptable stories, and of writing to inform the lucky
contributor that he would have a free two-year subscription to the
_Overland_ (payment of cash, as in the case of my rhymed satire, was an
extravagance not repeated so long as I remained with the magazine).

Before I had been in my new post a month, Mr. Finnegan inaugurated
a poetry contest. Readers of the _Overland_ were to send in their
favorite poetic quotations, not exceeding four lines each; cash prizes
were to be given for the five best submissions, and free subscriptions
were to be awarded for the twenty-five runners-up. There were to be
three judges: two designated writers of local reputation, and the
assistant editor--namely, myself. However, as things worked out, all
the labors of selection fell upon the assistant editor, the two local
celebrities being congenial souls, willing to utter a loud approving
“YES!” in return for the honor of some free publicity.

My problem was, to say the least, peculiar. It is hard enough to
decide among the submissions of unknown contributors: but here I was,
obliged to say which was the best from among selections by Shakespeare,
Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Landor, Keats, Browning, and other
outstanding poets. Should first prize go to Shelley or to Byron? Should
Tennyson come out third, or only fifth? Should Burns be placed above
Coleridge, or Blake above Emily Dickinson? Questions like these, of
course, would defy the judgment of any critic, and certainly would not
be answered alike by any two readers. But I unblushingly had to give
_the_ correct answer.

At last, however, after much brain-racking and sifting and weighing and
comparing, I showed Finnegan my choices for the five winners of cash
prizes.

He glanced over them, and groaned. His heavy puffy form sagged forward
at his desk in discouragement.

“My God, Cob,” he complained, “this is awful!”

“Awful? What’s awful?” I protested, prepared to defend my choices.
“Aren’t the quotations good enough?”

“Good enough, be damned!” he snorted, shoving the papers at me in
disgust. “Look at these winners, will you! Just look at them! Four from
California, and the fifth from Arizona!”

“That’s natural enough,” I reminded him, “considering that ninety-nine
per cent of our subscribers are westerners.”

“Hell, but do we have to let that be known?” he growled back. “We claim
a national circulation, don’t we? How the deuce we going to make good
that claim if we award all the prizes to Californians? Here, let’s see
those poetry contributions!”

For the next twenty minutes, Finnegan was busy exploring the piles
of manuscripts. Finally he looked up, his big round face beaming his
triumph, and thrust five papers toward me. “There--that’ll do it!”

I glanced hastily over five contributions of indifferent quality, and
saw that only one was from California. The others came from Wyoming,
Texas, New York, and Wisconsin.

For a few months I remained with the _Overland_, and doubtless could
have stayed as long as the tottering old magazine retained the breath
of life, which was not to be very long. But my two dollars a day, even
with the addition of various stray earnings, were barely enough to
keep me alive in the style to which I was accustomed (which required
a monthly expenditure of all of sixty or sixty-five dollars). Here, I
saw more clearly than ever, there was no future. And so once again my
thoughts ranged to wider horizons.

“Go East, young man!” was the injunction whispered into my ears by
my hopes and ambitions; and the East, of course, meant New York,
that Rome to which all literary aspirants sooner or later make their
pilgrimage of reverence. By degrees my plans took shape; and on one
never-to-be-forgotten day of September, 1920, I bade a heart-wrenching
farewell to my father and to the younger brother who stood beside
him at the railroad station in Stockton. I shall never forget how my
father’s words clutched at me as I saw him approach the porter, slip a
crumbled bit of paper into his hand, and mumble, brokenly, “Take good
care of the boy, Sam. Take good care of the boy.”

Then, safeguarded by a round-trip ticket, I had boarded the train that
was to bear me toward new poetic and personal adventures.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

A Mote in the Metropolis

The city to which I was winging my way was not on the surface a poetic
one. Among its long, traffic-clogged defiles, its endless miles of
five- and six-story residential buildings, its fabulous skyscrapers,
and its slums laden with pushcarts, evil odors, and dangling washing,
there was indeed picturesqueness and interest; but the tints were
mostly the drab and gray of prose. Here indeed, as time went by, I was
to find the subject-matter of poetry, which may bloom in the small
weed struggling to life beside a cobblestone quite as much as in the
free-blowing flowers of the fields. But here in the beginning my verses
reflected the solitude of the lonely wanderer among the swarm rather
than the enthusiasm of the visitor stirred by the physical or human
panoramas of the metropolis. I would write nostalgically of friends
and loved ones in the West, in lines which show less distinction of
utterance than poignancy of feeling:

Oh, that there gleamed some searchlight of the soul
To let us view the cherished far away,
And intimately follow, day by day,
Loved ones that dwell where alien oceans roll.

The need for personal friendship was expressed in another sonnet of
about this time:

Oh, why do friends, like meteors of the dark,
Gleam to the sight, then go some hidden way?
Like lingering music cheer us for a day,
Then vanish swiftly as a chance remark?

These pieces, and others like them, including poems on more general
themes--to none of which I would now grant the nod of critical
approval--I find written out in a crumbling old notebook, some with
notations showing that they had been printed in papers such as the New
York _Sun_ and _Herald_ (then not yet absorbed by the _Tribune_). But
they are numerous enough to prove that, in the lonely room which I
occupied--first, the gas-lit cubbyhole on the top floor of an ancient
brownstone building on West Eighty-Fourth Street, and later the more
modern quarters not a block from the little Fordham park containing
Poe’s famous cottage--I had by no means forgotten my Muse. And this
despite the dire necessity to earn my way if I wished to remain in New
York.

I had set out blithely enough to conquer the great city, my pockets
bristling with ammunition in the shape of letters of introduction
from friends in the West. But I was soon to learn that most of my
high-powered shells were really duds. This I began to suspect after
my first interview, with a Nassau Street lawyer whom I will give the
name of Frederick Horton--a man said to have extensive connections in
Manhattan.

Mr. Horton received me courteously in a room lined with great
leather-bound tomes, and glanced at me amiably through his horn-rimmed
spectacles across the polished width of his great oaken desk.

“Ah, Mr. Coblentz!... But you’ll let me call you Stanton? Glad you
stepped in! George wrote me you were coming. I’ve a number of things to
talk to you about.”

I would hardly have been human if I had not felt a flash of hope at
this cordial, not to say chummy reception. Doubtless Mr. Horton, with
his wide associations, knew of some literary openings.

The lawyer’s ferret eyes narrowed in a face seamed with the wisdom of
fifty winters; all the amiability had been drained from them while he
surveyed me appraisingly, as if I were a client approaching him with a
questionable case.

His swivel chair creaked as he swung slightly to one side, and,
thrusting his bullet-head toward me, threw his questions like a
cross-examiner.

“So, Stanton! You’re out to earn your way in the big city?”

“That’s right,” I acknowledged, with the sinking feeling of one
entering a plea of guilty.

“You want to be a writer--a poet?”

“Guess your brother George has told you all about that?” I countered,
thinking a direct answer unnecessary.

“Yes, indeed.”

He sat inspecting me solemnly, and unconsciously shook his head, in the
way of one who says, “Too bad! Too bad!”

“Of course,” he went on, slowly, picking his words with difficulty,
“you understand that the writing game isn’t exactly as easy as falling
downstairs. Still, I wonder--do you realize how very hard it is?”

I sat staring at him gravely.

“You’re tackling something so tough that one hundred thousand persons
in New York are starving at it,” he went on in warning tones, drawing
his features together darkly. “It’s darned lucky you came to me,
Stanton; I can give you more pointers than most fellows. You see I’ve
known so many good writers who went under. There was Bill Arlington--if
I had more time, I’d tell you about poor Bill. Then there was Joe
McBride--poor devil, met him in the Village just the other day--looked
like he needed the loan of a dime. And Jim Callender--well, a million
dollars wouldn’t help him where he is now, and I always say it’s a
merciful release. There are others, too, lots of them.”

By this time I felt as if a leaden bar were pressing down upon my head.

“You see, Stanton,” Horton finished, puffing out his chest like
a _paterfamilias_ who has done his painful duty by the younger
generation, “I believe in being frank. Better for you that way in the
long run. Why not pick some graft where the pace isn’t quite so hard?
I’d suggest--”

I thanked him, and rose to leave.

“Just one point more,” he added, as he escorted me warmly, almost
affectionately toward the door, “I have a friend, Dick Grosset, who
used to be a writer himself, before he found he had to make a living
and turned to real estate. He’s with Dunstall, Grosset, and Brown--a
million-dollar firm. Knows a lot more than I do about the literary
humbug. Suppose we all have lunch together some day?”

Without waiting for my acquiescence, which he took for granted, Horton
went on to request, “Here, give the girl over there your address! I’ll
let you know just as soon as I’ve been in touch with Dick.”

But that was the last I ever heard from Horton.

My enthusiasm was just a little subdued as I went to visit the next man
on my list.

My second letter of introduction was to a prominent preacher, who was
courtesy personified, and promptly sat down and wrote two further
letters of introduction. One of these was to the editor of a literary
monthly, with which I had hopes of a connection; but all that this
great man could do was to dictate still another letter of introduction,
to a friend who volunteered to send me yet further on my travels with
an additional letter of introduction.

By this time I was feeling just a little like a rat in a treadmill.
“The best way,” I decided, “is to make the introductions myself.”

And so, armed with no passport but my own resolution--or, if you wish
to call it that, my own effrontery--I began visiting the editors of my
choice. In the beginning I found reason to fear that Mr. Horton might
be only too correct in his gloomy prognosis: from office to office I
took my way, seeking an opening in an editorial staff; and openings in
editorial staffs appeared about as easy to find as free passageways
into armored cars. At every office they were “completely staffed”; but
at every office they were obligingly willing to take down my name and
address, just in case.... However, this did not delude me.

For an endless two weeks the merry search went on, while the nest egg
I had brought with me to New York became noticeably thinner and more
sickly looking. Clearly, I must do something--and soon. It was but
natural, therefore, that I should think of book reviewing, in which I
had had well over a year’s experience on the _Argonaut_. I remembered
a letter from the magazine’s editor, Sidney Corwyn, _To Whom It May
Concern_; and I decided that it might concern the editors of the New
York reviewing sections. The first one whom I approached was Robert
Jermain Cole, a gentle and sensitive being, then book editor of the
old _Herald_, a job in which he would not remain much longer. (Years
later I was to be briefly in touch with him again, when he wrote from
Paris to send me some poems for my magazine _Wings_ shortly after its
establishment in 1933.) Cole received me pleasantly; glanced over my
letter _To Whom It May Concern_; scrutinized several clippings of my
reviews from the _Argonaut_; and then, to my boundless delight, made
the first dent in the solid wall surrounding me ever since my arrival
in New York. He reached into one of the crowded bookshelves behind him,
pulled out a huge tome, and suggested, “Maybe you’ll let me have six
hundred words on this?”

“Copy due on Thursday,” he went on, as, after profuse thanks, I turned
to leave.

This, as it happened, was only the beginning. Before long, as will
appear a little later, I was reviewing books for other media also; was
writing articles (when I could get them assigned to me) for the Sunday
_Herald_ and other publications; and was interviewing for _Success
Magazine_.

The connection with _Success_ (an “inspirational” magazine that was
to prove a notable failure, and was to be followed by a new failure
called _The New Success_) would not have come to me except for my
poetic interests. The dean of American poets at that time, a man whose
work I greatly admired (as I still do) was Edwin Markham; and through
some mutual acquaintance I had obtained the one letter of personal
introduction that brought me much except gainless footwork. Having
written Markham at his home in Staten Island, I was invited to visit
him on a specified Sunday afternoon; and you may be sure that, even had
my engagements been innumerable (which was far from the case), nothing
short of the necessity of swimming the distance would have kept me away.

My recollections of the visit are most pleasant: the large
old-fashioned house, in agreeable rustic surroundings; the spirit
of amiability and hospitality that pervaded the small gathering;
the Markhams themselves, Mrs. Markham a kindly elderly woman with a
heart-warming manner, and still personally attractive; and Mr. Markham
looking every inch the poet, white-bearded as a patriarch, with
cordial, twinkling eyes, and a voice that could roll like that of one
of the old bards when intoning his own poems.

Unlike a host of this latter-day age, who would have made it a point
of honor not to let his guests stretch their legs further than between
their car-doors and his house-door, Markham took his visitors on a
stroll down a wooded lane, then dreamily beautiful with the first tan
and crimson of the autumn foliage. I remember that I was privileged
to walk at his side for a good part of the time; he took my arm, in a
fatherly way, and discoursed to me on matters connected with poetry,
though not only with poetry, for I recall his advice to read Carlyle,
and his appraisal of the great moral strength and conviction behind the
famous Scotsman’s writing.

One of the visitors that afternoon was a bald middle-aged man who was
introduced to me as “Mr. Mackay,” and who, I was told, was the editor
of _Success Magazine_. It was at his own initiative, and not owing to
any suggestion of mine, that he said to me, before the meeting broke up
that evening, “Listen, Coblentz. If you’re in the neighborhood of 1133
Broadway some day before long, drop in to see me. Bring some of your
writings--enough to give me an idea what you can do. Don’t forget!”

As I shook his hand, I assured him heartily that I would not forget.
Nor did I. Not many days had passed before I had seen the inside of the
offices of _Success Magazine_; and not many additional days had gone
by before Mr. Mackay, after looking over some samples of my prose and
verse, made me a proposition.

“Ever done any interviewing?”

“A little for the _Examiner_.”

“Well, we need something better than newspaper interviewing. Every
now and then some celebrity passes through town, and we arrange for
one of our writers to visit him and get his views on some important
subject--such as the prospects of the League of Nations, or the
position of women in India, or the future of air travel. Think you
could handle an occasional assignment?”

To this question I gave the expected answer.

“We can’t pay very much,” he drawled on, his stubby fingers drumming
meditatively at his desk. “Twenty-five dollars an article is as high as
we can go.”

Since twenty-five dollars looked as big to me as the side of a
mountain, I assured him that this would be satisfactory.

And thus it came about that I interviewed various notables, of whom far
from the least was Einstein, as modest a man as you could meet, who
spoke through an interpreter, and tried his obliging best to make plain
to me some of the root principles of relativity, though he was less
receptive to certain other reporters, one of whom wanted to know what
he ate for breakfast and was told that the question was too trivial to
answer.

Of all whom I interviewed, only two were poets: the huge, bluff
Gilbert Chesterton; and Rabindranath Tagore, who struck me as no other
human being has ever done. I am at a loss, even after many years, to
explain my awesome feeling upon being ushered into the presence of the
saintly-looking, white-bearded figure--the sense of having come into
contact with a superior being. But it is not enough to say that he was
saintly-looking, and might have been mistaken for one of the patriarchs
of Biblical times; nor would it help to try to repeat any of the wise
things he said. It was simply that, from the man himself, from his very
surroundings, there seemed to emanate spiritual greatness. Even in
memory, it is not hard for me to recapture something of the peculiar,
fascinating spell of his presence, although, among all the people I
have subsequently met, this feeling has never been duplicated, nor even
approached.

In view of the amount of time which I gave to the miscellaneous jobs
necessary to meet room and restaurant bills, it is hard for me now to
see how I could have found much leisure for poetry. My principal work,
in the course of time, came to be book reviewing; regularly I brought
home piles of the latest fiction and non-fiction; I remember a friend
telling with a chuckle how he once met me on a downtown street, my arms
so full of brand-new volumes that I looked like a book salesman. Until
the _Herald_ was merged with the _Tribune_ in 1924, I was one of its
most frequent reviewers, most of the time under Mr. Cole’s successor,
the severe-looking but friendly Arthur Bartlett Maurice; I also was
permitted to do feature reviews and smaller items for the _Times_,
first under Dr. Clifford Smyth and then under Brooks Atkinson, a thin,
wiry, whimsically smiling man later to be better known as dramatic
critic. At the same time, I reviewed for the _Literary Review_ of the
_Post_ under Dr. Henry Seidel Canby; for the _Tribune_ under Burton
Rascoe, the _Bookman_ under John Farrar, the _Sun_, the _Dial_, and
subsequently the _International Book Review_, which was published for
some years by the ill-fated _Literary Digest_. Never let it be said
that the great, callous city of New York is cold and unreceptive to the
unknown newcomer. I, at least, did not find this to be the case.

Among the multitudes of books which passed through my hands--sometimes
as many as twenty-five or thirty unreviewed works stood simultaneously
on my shelves--there was everything from a cookbook for cafeterias to
a monograph on the intelligence of insects. Books of poetry and books
about poetry were much in the minority, though they did come to me
occasionally. But I continued to write poems, and not only short ones
but long, including seventeen hundred lines of blank verse, _The Light
Beyond the Sunset_, which I completed sometime during my first two
years in New York, and which, whatever else you may say about it, did
not exactly pick a tried and familiar theme; it dealt with the imagined
experiences of one who had survived death. This lengthy composition,
so far as I can remember, was not permitted to bore many publishers,
though I recall one who told me he could not publish it because it was
too short for a saleable volume--ah, if only I had spun out another
thousand lines! But from later experience, I now suspect that, if it
had had the extra thousand lines, he would have found it too long for
publication.

I also remember submitting the poem to a Boston publisher, who had
himself written many poems, as well as a number of translations in
verse. Since his publishing house (now long out of existence) issued
occasional books of poetry, I hopefully mailed him _The Light Beyond
the Sunset_. And, a short time afterwards, my hope expanded from a
flicker to a blaze, upon the receipt of a letter: “Dear Mr. Coblentz: I
will be in New York on Thursday the eighteenth. If you can meet me at
2:30 that afternoon in the lobby of the Bryant Hotel, I should like to
talk over your poem with you.”

Truly, a case of the mountain coming to Mahomet! So the great publisher
Mr. Bruce (to give him a name which was not his) was to be in New York!
Not that I flattered myself that his visit was for the sole or even the
principal purpose of seeing a nobody like myself. But how could I help
being elated that so important a man would take up time with my poem?
What could this mean? Naturally, that he wanted to publish the poem.
Nothing less, surely, could prompt a personal interview.

Precisely at two-thirty on Thursday the eighteenth, I entered the lobby
of the Bryant, so excited that it never even occurred to me to remove
my topcoat in the overheated room. I found Mr. Bruce as good as his
word: he seemed to recognize me by something in my looks or manner as
I stared about the lobby with an anxious, appraising glance. There he
was, dressed in dull brown, a spindly man, in his sixties, with a thin
goat-like face and a wispy gray beard. He greeted me enthusiastically;
and trembling just a little now that the great occasion was upon me, I
dropped into a seat beside him.

His opinion of _The Light Beyond the Sunset_ was not long in coming
out. He regarded it as “almost a great poem”--a view which I can report
without a blush, since I consider it about as flattering as if he had
credited me with being “almost intelligent” or “almost honest.” He
would be proud to publish the work, but there were, unfortunately,
some little difficulties--he coughed, and hesitated--some little
difficulties, mostly of a financial nature, which should not even be
mentioned in connection with so fine a poem. But if I could manage a
mere few hundred dollars--

Alas, I could not manage a mere few hundred dollars! All at once my
rainbowed cloud castles collapsed. I had to console myself with the
thought that my “almost great poem” had been almost published. Mr.
Bruce and I, after a long talk about poets and poems generally, said
our goodbyes with mutual cordiality, though nothing more was mentioned
as to _The Light Beyond the Sunset_. This was not to be my last contact
with the man, for sometime later, when he learned that I was compiling
the anthology _Modern American Lyrics_, he sent me an enormous tome
of his sumptuously printed _Collected Poems_ from which to make
selections; and when I could find only one short piece that seemed to
deserve admission, he was sorely disappointed, not to say aggrieved at
my lack of critical discrimination, and probably never forgave me.

Mention of _Modern American Lyrics_ brings me back to the subject of
contemporary poetry in general, which I was following insofar as my
reviewing jobs permitted. I still felt that America was witnessing a
poetic revival, just as I felt this when I wrote my college thesis;
and I wished to do whatever I could to proclaim that great fact, and
to make the poets of the new age known to a public to whom poets still
did not seem important. At the same time, I wanted to warn of dangers
that seemed ever-present and ever-increasing. One method was by means
of articles, and in this I was fortunate: the _New York Times Book
Review_ under Brooks Atkinson on several occasions allowed me a full
page. Referring again to the old clippings, at which I have not glanced
for dozens of years--not, in fact, since they were first culled from
the paper--I see that on February 25, 1923, under the heading of _Oases
and Mirages of the Poetic Desert_, I declared that “It is stimulating
to observe how much good poetry is being written in America today, and
depressing to witness how much poor poetry is being applauded.” As an
example of the “poor poetry,” I quoted from a contribution to Professor
Howard Willard Cook’s critical anthology, _Our Poets of Today_:

I grasped the greasy subway strap
And read the lurid advertisements,
I chewed my gum voraciously,
Inhaled strange fumes pugnaciously,
I heard the grating of the wheels
And felt that the chords
Of my city soul
Were in perfect tune.

Worse than this, far worse, has since been perpetrated, but back
in the innocent early twenties, this was bad enough to be noted as
an example of misbranded poetry, and an indication of the perils
ahead--perils recently all too fully realized. By way of contrast to
such barren prose, however, I devoted the greater part of the article
to more capable poems, including _Fog_, by John Reed, the exquisite
early sonnets of David Morton, several offerings by Hermann Hagedorn
and Arthur Davison Ficke, and the now unfortunately forgotten lyricist
Kendall Banning. Alas, it required far more than any mere article of
mine to keep these things of beauty before the eyes of a world that
concentrated furiously on the things of utility, the things of luxury,
and the things of finance. It is a strange and not a heartening thought
that my very article has no doubt long been lost to the mind of every
being on earth except myself, probably even to the memory of the editor
who accepted the material.

But realizing the fugitive quality of all periodical publication, I
early gave my chief thought to books, a medium that might preserve--at
least, a little longer than the fluttering pages of papers--such things
as I could offer in poetry or prose.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

The Magic World between Covers

One day late in 1923 or early in 1924, I walked into the offices of a
newly established publishing firm, and spoke with Earle H. Balch, later
to be editor-in-chief of Putnams--a handsome young man of about thirty,
with one of the most ingratiating smiles I can remember. Also, I met
Melville Minton, the future President of Putnams, whose death not long
ago caused widespread regret in publishing circles; at the time of our
meeting, he was a debonaire book salesman in early middle life, and had
joined forces with Balch to form the firm of Minton, Balch and Company.

My object in seeing Balch was to present an idea for an anthology of
poetry. In the course of my reviewing and miscellaneous reading, I had
come across many poets, some of them unknown or virtually unknown,
whose work seemed worthy of preservation; these, published along with
examples from the writings of more celebrated authors, would provide
a valuable cross-section of contemporary American poetry. At the
same time, I hoped to avoid a confusion already becoming common: the
confusion of bracketing indisputable poetry together with work not
recognizable as poetry by any standard known before the second decade
of this century.

Balch was sufficiently interested to ask me to draw up a prospectus
and a list of tentative inclusions, which, needless to say, I did
very gladly. And there came a happy day, not many weeks later, when
I was told that my prospectus had been approved, and that I would be
commissioned to compile an anthology, for which Balch proposed the
title, _Modern American Lyrics_.

Alas, on that bright day, I was still to be educated in the trials,
heartaches, and problems of an anthologist.

Those trials, heartaches, and problems were by no means to be
exclusively literary. On the contrary, they were primarily as
non-literary as a contract to buy wheat or potatoes. And this was
because you could not simply dig into the bin of contemporary poetry,
and pick whatever you wished without reference to copyright holders.
None, of course, will question that this is as it should be; the author
and the publisher must be protected in the use of their product. On
the other hand, this makes the compilation of an anthology something
like the running of a hurdle race; and the roadblock it establishes
may be less damaging to the anthologist than to the poets he hopes
to represent. Back in the twenties, however, the situation was less
discouraging than it has since become. Permissions to reprint were
easier to obtain, and the requested fees were fewer and more moderate;
in later years the very making of anthologies--one of the chief
means by which less known poets may gain an audience and a chance
for survival--has been all but prohibited except to compilers and
publishers with wide resources.

As a verse-writer, I endorse the principle that poets should be paid
for the use of their material in compilations; but as an anthologist,
I can testify that this is not always possible. My publishers did
agree to allow a certain sum to be deducted from royalties and applied
to fees for permissions; I cannot recall whether the amount was one
hundred dollars, or two hundred; in any event, it was small enough.
When I asked permission, for example, to reprint a poem by Robert
Frost--not then, nor at any time, one of my favorite poets--the
requested price of twenty-five dollars gave me such a budgetary
headache that I saw no choice except to do without Frost. And when I
wrote to a certain writer, whose poem in a current magazine was one
of those borderline cases that had caused me much hesitation, the
author solved all my doubts when he wrote in from Europe, asking the
compensation of twenty dollars--his poem, so far as I know, remains
unanthologized until this day.

This occurrence, however, was wholly exceptional; every other poet I
consulted was willing, even eager to have his work appear regardless
of remuneration; it was the publishers who gave the trouble, when
there was trouble (though many of them were most cooperative). Thus,
there was the case of the poet who wrote me, “I’d be delighted to have
you use my poems, without charge. But the copyright, unfortunately,
is owned by the publishers; and they are certain to ask fees, maybe
more than you are prepared to pay.” It occurred to me, therefore, that
it would be poor strategy to consult the publishers; and so I wrote
back to the author: “I notice that your book was published years ago.
If it is no longer selling, the publishers probably have no further
use for the copyright, and will release it to you upon request. After
that, I can apply directly to you for reprint permission.” Sometime
later, I had a letter from the author, stating that he had followed
my suggestion, that the copyright was now his, and that he granted me
permission to reprint his work.

In another instance, in which I wished to use several poems by one
writer, I applied to the publishers who had issued his books years
before; and was asked a fee that would have made my budget totter.
Being in communication with the author, I notified him of the request,
and he wrote back hotly: “The publishers you mention no longer have
any rights in my work. The rights were taken over by K, my present
publisher, who has stipulated that I have absolute disposition of the
reprint privileges. I therefore grant you the permission you ask--and
don’t be foolish enough to pay the first publishers a fee.”

Still another writer granted permission with this peculiar warning:
“Don’t under any circumstances write to my publishers to confirm this
consent, though you should, of course, print the usual acknowledgment
to them. This letter is sufficient and final.” It was indeed sufficient
and final; neither in this case, nor in any other connected with any
of the four anthologies I have compiled, has any person challenged my
right of inclusion.

An anthologist, I found, has to be nothing so much as a letter-writer;
my correspondence was voluminous, far more so than I could have
foreseen, and seemed never-ending. Letters began coming in from all
variety of sources, along with manuscripts, magazines, and books
of poems with suggestions for inclusion. But how did this happen?
Did I advertise for material? Naturally not. Nevertheless, a sort
of underground publicity campaign was at work, and one not of my
deliberate making. When I wrote, for example, to poet Phil Brown
asking permission to reprint his sonnet _Midsummer_, Phil might be
so elated that--with no thought at all of advertising my forthcoming
compilation--he would mention my letter to his verse-writing friends
Joe Thompson and Ed Williams; and Joe and Ed, seeing no reason to go
unrepresented when Phil was to be included, would write me nominating
themselves as candidates for anthologizing, and would send quantities
of their work in support of the nomination, in some cases whole floods
of volumes. The result was not, I am sorry to say, a vast increase
in acceptable material; the result was an immense addition to my own
labors, since most of the volunteered material was of poor quality,
some of it atrociously bad. Already, I fear, though I had set out with
the best of intentions, I was making enemies among poets--the editor’s
inevitable lot, since no way yet has been invented of making every
submitted manuscript acceptable.

Errors of judgment in selection do, of course, occur, and must occur,
though no two persons may agree as to what the particular mistakes
have been. Other errors, too, as I learned with deep pain, may creep
in, though there was nothing to parallel the case of one of my own
subsequent printed poems, in which “flashing reel” became converted
into “fishing reel.” But things seemed bad enough when an author wrote
me with a justifiable sense of injury that her sonnet had appeared in
thirteen lines. This, indeed, was true, as I confirmed upon consulting
the book; and it hardly helped matters that, so far as the sequence of
ideas was concerned, the poem seemed not to have lost by the omission
of the line. I did not know, and do not know to this day, whether the
fault lay in an inexcusable error in proofreading, or in the careless
last-minute dropping out of a bar of type by the printer, who was
unaware that sonnets should come in fourteen lines; in any event, that
error, though corrected in later editions, probably tormented me as
much as it did the author.

There were actually two subsequent printings of _Modern American
Lyrics_ as such, in addition to a joint printing with _Modern British
Lyrics_, which first appeared in 1925. In connection with the combined
volume--whose year of publication I cannot readily determine, since
I lent my only copy to a friend, who never returned it--an incident
occurs to me, doubtless a little irrelevant to the present discussion,
but perhaps worth telling. One summer several years after the birth of
the two anthologies, I was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco;
and my eyes fell upon a volume entitled _Modern Lyrics_. Automatically
I picked it up, and lo and behold! I saw my own name as compiler! What
was that? Did I suffer from acute amnesia, causing forgetfulness of my
own actions? How could I be the editor of an anthology that I did not
even know I had compiled?

A hasty examination, however, showed that the book was nothing more nor
less than _Modern American Lyrics_ and _Modern British Lyrics_ united
under a single cover. But what was this firm of Loring and Mussey,
whose name I read on the title page? A combine of pirates?

Considerably confused, I wrote to Earle Balch, and in the normal
course received the explanation. His firm had sold the reprint rights
to Loring and Mussey, as it was entitled to do by contract, but had
forgotten to notify me of the deal. In due time, I would receive my
share of the returns, as provided by our agreement.

As I look back over the preface of _Modern American Lyrics_, I find
that same effort to distinguish poetry from pseudo-poetry which,
rightly or wrongly, has remained one of my preoccupations throughout
the years. In referring to pseudo-poetry, I was chiefly concerned, then
as now, with certain innovators who, it seemed to me, were abandoning
poetry for the sake of novelty, were turning out transparently
disguised prose, and so were spreading confusion over the poetic world,
and tending to make all poetry look ridiculous. Referring to certain
modern compilations then recommended as good, I remarked:

Page after page ... is devoted to formless effusions whose music is
less than the music of dignified prose; page after page is filled
with the sordid things of everyday, with kitchen sinks and bathtubs
and cobblestones and loveless adulteries. And if in the interlude--as
frequently occurs--one comes across a glowing sentiment or memorable
melody or flash of imagination that reveals wide vistas of the
sun-tinged storm-clouds or of the starry night-skies, then one is
likely to be plunged in the next page into the monologue of a real
estate agent if not into an epic of the hog-pens.

If I were to write this in regard to the anthologies of today, there
would not be a word I would have to reconsider, except that the phrase
“as frequently occurs” might now seem an overstatement.

Even before the appearance of _Modern American Lyrics_, I had made my
bid for recognition in a collection, _The Thinker and Other Poems_.
Doubtless I was as proud of this as most writers are of their first
published masterpieces; but let me hasten to add that I am proud of
it no longer, nor have I been for many a year. I would perhaps not
go so far as one poet I once heard of, who offered a handsome price
for copies of his first book; and having retrieved quite a few at
considerable cost and trouble, disposed of them all in one great
bonfire, in the hope of thus extirpating all trace of his youthful
folly. But if I would not seek to emulate this holocaust, the reason
is that I see no need for the poet himself to weed out what time is
certain to obliterate. I will not say that _The Thinker_ does not
truthfully embody much of the thought, feeling, and imagination of my
youth. But in glancing back over the poems (a form of self-chastisement
I rarely submit myself to), I find few if any that I would not present
in different garments were I writing them today. Then why do I not
revise them? Because life goes on to new impulses and expressions, and
it would be as difficult to return to the mood and outlook of yesterday
as to go back to the haunts of one’s childhood.

I must not give the impression that any publisher was waiting with
outstretched hands for this early darling of my heart. Then, as now,
no publisher was enthusiastic about the chance to lose money; then,
as now, it was difficult to find a market for poetry, though markedly
less so than it has since become. Even while in California, I had been
in contact with the firm of James T. White and Company, which issued
occasional books of verse, though its chief publication, if I remember
rightly, was an encyclopedia of American biography (which, I believe,
it still issues). One day sometime after my arrival in New York, I
stepped into the offices of the firm at 70 Fifth Avenue, and saw Mr.
White, a thin, aged, learned-looking man, whose hair matched his name;
and also met his amiable editor, James B. Kenyon, probably then in his
late sixties--the author of no less than nine books of verse and three
of prose not unfamiliar to an earlier day, though I suspect that few
nowadays remember him. The tone of his poems, which were not without
quality even though lacking that supreme element which makes one poet
soar above a thousand and surmount the generations, is indicated by
these lines from _Reed Voices_ (James T. White, 1917):

’Mid the dusk reeds that fledge the twilight streams,
Nature’s wild troubadours, the breezes, make
Such strange sweet songs as echo through our dreams,
And haunt our baffled memories when we wake.

To Mr. Kenyon, who received me in a friendly way, I showed some of my
own poems; and his approval, while perhaps over-generous, naturally led
to a discussion of the possible publication of a collection. It was
some time before a way could be worked out; but finally it was decided
that, if I could dispose of a certain number of copies, the firm would
undertake the publication. Do not suppose that there was anything
unusual or degrading about such an arrangement; it was then and has
since become even more decisively the rule among first books of verse,
most of which would otherwise never see the light--and if the first
book does not see the light, what of the second, and the third? As a
matter of fact, I did not stand to lose much (nor was I financially
able to lose much), for I knew where I could dispose of numbers of
copies, even though I did not yet realize that many acquaintances who
will buy a first book out of good will or curiosity would no sooner
purchase a second than they would subscribe for shares in a company
dedicated to raising white elephants. I did not, of course, personally
solicit sales; but the company circularized a list of names provided
by me. Bookstore sales counted for little if anything; but there was
one store that did sell quite a few copies--a store such as, I would
hazard a guess, has rarely if ever, before or since, dealt in books of
verse. A cousin of mine, a bright and literate woman who was always
especially kind to me, ran a sort of emporium of ladies’ goods on
Washington Heights; and what should be added to the stock in trade but
_The Thinker and Other Poems_! Recommended by the sagacious proprietor,
this book went off into more than one home where poems were ordinarily
in no great demand.

But already I was learning some of the trials of the young author. In
my inexperience, I had given no thought to so important a matter as
the size of the type to be used; and when I saw the proofs, I observed
with a shock that the print was minute (actually, eight point, whereas
nowadays I would approve nothing less than eleven or twelve point). So
hard was the book to peruse that its author, after it came out, could
never read more than a poem or two at a time, and rarely subjected his
eyes to this much strain. You may say that this had the advantage of
keeping down the number of readers, but I am sure no such precaution
was necessary. It may have been the small type, or it may have been
mere ineptitude that caused me to miss a number of errors; one of them,
in particular, seems considerably more amusing to me now than when I
originally discovered it: my poem of tender sentiment, _On My Mother’s
Photograph_, had come out, “On My Mother’s Phonograph.”

Despite the small print, despite the typographical errors, despite the
amateurishness of many of the poems, _The Thinker_ was extensively
and on the whole favorably reviewed; I received a gratifying wealth
of clippings from papers ranging from New York to Puget Sound. I
mention this, however, not with any sense of personal triumph, but
because similar good luck does not befall books of verse by unknown
writers today; a traditional collection such as mine, issued without
advertising and under the imprint of a relatively obscure publisher,
could now be certain to be ignored altogether outside the author’s home
town, or at most would be honored by one or two three- or four-line
notices from secondary organs. In this difference one can measure the
extent to which poetry, in the course of several decades, has fallen in
critical and general esteem.

CHAPTER
NINE

Blood Brother to the Epic

Certain writers, such as Poe and Baudelaire, have contended that there
is no such thing as a long poem. And these writers, consistently, have
never written any long poems--that is to say, compositions running to
many hundreds or thousands of lines; the cynical critic might, indeed,
accuse them of sharing the common blindness of men to accomplishments
beyond the scope of their own aptitudes. In any event, the case for the
long poem need not be argued, for it has been proved in action by not a
few writers, including Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Camoëns, Chaucer,
Spenser, Milton, Goethe, and many others. An extended theme, after all,
requires extended expression; and it is hard to see why a long poem may
not bear the same relationship to a short one, as a novel does to the
short story or a full-length play to a skit or a sketch.

That long poems are unpopular nowadays is another matter; (what else
can be expected in a day when all poetry is unpopular?). But the
question of popularity never entered my head when I launched into more
than one composition whose lines could be numbered in four figures.
Truly, I wrote what I wanted to write, and naturally hoped for the
best, but never gave much thought to the possible reception of the
work (which might show the impractical nature of poets, if their
impracticality were not already proved by the fact that they write
verse at all). Nevertheless, what joy to pick a theme on which you
might sail away into gorgeous cloud-lands, filling page after page with
the ever-expanding story, setting down in succinct rhymed lines your
views on life and on man, and creating something which (to you, at
least) is vivid and living where previously nothing at all has been!
Characters that arise out of the mist to take on flesh and blood!
Scenes and places that assume visible outlines, though to be found
nowhere on earth except in one poet’s imagination! And the rhymes
themselves--they were a challenge and a delight: the challenge of
problems to master, and a delight when they seemed deftly to say just
what you wanted, even if sometimes you had not known you wished to say
precisely this until the words formed themselves in your mind!

Day after day, I learned, one can invoke the necessary mood of
detachment. Indeed, this mood comes the more easily for being sought
regularly, and sought at about the same time each day, seven days a
week; an interruption of even a day or two will make it more difficult
to regain. I found this to be the case when engaged, all one carefree
summer, in putting together the first of my long poems ever to see
print. This composition, _The Lone Adventurer_, was written mostly in
California, where Flora and I had gone in July and August of 1926 to
visit my father in the hot but delightfully green and spacious city
of Stockton. The preceding months had been among the most painful and
wearing in my experience: Flora’s father had died; she herself had
undergone a major operation; and I had been subjected to long-drawn
torments of dental surgery. And so the writing of the poem, “For him
who would forget awhile the noise / Of careworn cities, drenched in
sweat and steam,” constituted an inexpressible relief, though I would
not use the word “escape,” since to be in a quiet California town, with
its long elm-shaded streets, its unfenced gardens, and its walnut,
fig, and oleander trees, was to enjoy all the escape the city-wounded
wanderer needed.

Morning after morning, while I lay stretched out with pen and paper on
the lawn of the unfrequented block-square city park at Eldorado and
Acacia Streets, looking up at the palm trees or down at the robins
and sparrows hopping inquisitively about the grass, I spun out the
seven-line stanzas of the poem, which told of the search of Prince
Lodalga for the magical pool:

High on the highest peak of all the range,
In a chill fastness far from human sight,
Walled from the ruinous touch of Time and Change,
There is a pool that sparkles mirror-bright.
And he who peers in it, and sees aright,
May catch a phantom gleam, a flash of wings,
And read the hidden meaning of all things.

While I lay on the lawn in a far-off mood, letting the lines of the
poem tumble into my mind, Flora sat near me with a book. But her
presence caused no distraction; though not a poet herself, she had
an understanding of the needs of creation and never broke in with an
unnecessary remark. Ah, patient wife of a poet, who could restrain
herself and contentedly walk the ways of silence, when others less
sensitive would have burst out in irrelevant and destructive speech!

It was a rare morning when I did not put out seven, eight, nine, or ten
stanzas, which would be revised at my leisure later in the day (and
then revised again and again before their final typing). Hence it is
not surprising that the end of the summer saw the completion of the
poem, well over two thousand lines in all.

Having written _Finis_, I naturally thought of finding a publisher.
This might seem impossible in these later days, when many publishers
frankly proclaim that they are not interested in poetry of any type,
while others, apparently on the theory that if poetry must be endured
at all it had better be taken in small doses, throw up their hands
hopelessly at the very thought of a _long_ poem.--Even if _Paradise
Lost_ were to be submitted, or _Prometheus Unbound_, or _The Eve of
St. Agnes and Other Poems_, the verdict would be the same, without
benefit of one stray glance at the unpromising manuscript. But back in
the pristine days of 1926, the situation was different--at least, if
I may judge by the results. _The Lone Adventurer_ was not ready for
submission before my return to New York in September; and I do not
recall, nor do any records inform me, what publishers, if any, during
the next month or two, declined with thanks the privilege of adding
it to their responsibilities. But what I do know is that, as early as
December, publishing arrangements had been made.

One day I invaded the offices of the newly founded Unicorn Press,
on West Forty-Second Street (not to be confused with the entirely
unrelated more recent establishment of the same name). There I had the
opportunity of interviewing the young proprietors, Messrs. Kline and
Blum; and having entrusted them with the precious manuscript, I was
delighted--what poet would not have been?--to learn of the eventual
acceptance of my _magnum opus_. My joy, I should add, sprang largely
from the fact that the Unicorn Press was not--at least, not so far as
my own experience taught me--one of the so-called vanity publishers,
which act as purveyors of books financed by their authors. It was a
legitimate royalty house--too bad, therefore, that I did not foresee
the knots and tangles into which such a house can entrap an author!

Obviously, one reason for the acceptance of _The Lone Adventurer_ was
that the new and unknown Unicorn Press needed writers--prose writers
much more than poets. The following may seem a little apart from our
main theme, though there is a connection: within three or four months,
Kline and Blum offered me a contract for a long book dealing with
the history of warlike methods, of which at that time I had written
only about fifty pages. The title was to be _Marching Men, The Story
of War_, and I had to face a deadline only a few months ahead--a
deadline which I met after a concentrated seven-day-a-week effort that
need not be described here. Alas for an author’s hopes! the book was
indeed issued, in a handsome format, nearly five hundred pages of it,
embellished with copious illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg; and it was
a book which, I was informed by persons in a position to know, should
have had a wide sale. But even before it was in print, events of which
I was then unaware were casting the shadow of disaster.

The owners of the Unicorn Press, as I was subsequently told, were mired
in deep financial straits. So desperately did they need immediate cash
that they committed the unpardonable, the ruinous act of selling over a
thousand copies of my book at reduced rates to used-book dealers even
before it had been placed on the regular market or reviewers had had
a chance to see a copy (they could afford to do this, since they had
omitted the formality of paying the printers). No book could survive
such a calamity; the least of my losses was that I received none of the
expected royalties. No other publisher would handle a book whose market
had been so undermined, though more than one told me that he would
have published it had it been submitted to him originally (actually,
one small publisher did offer me a contract for the book several years
later, but financial difficulties prevented him from carrying out the
agreement); while long afterwards, in 1946, an offer to reissue the
work came to me out of the void from a New York reprint publisher; but
the plates having been destroyed, the deal was never consummated.

All of this may seem like a digression, but it will indicate what
sort of a publisher I had found for _The Lone Adventurer_. Blithely
unaware of anything less than perfect in my new connection, I saw the
book appear, appropriately green-covered, with an appealing red and
black jacket, and large type; and if a poet’s chief aim is a published
volume, I had at least one satisfaction. The months went by; there
were reviews, comments from friends, and letters from readers (though
not many letters); but as in the later case of _Marching Men_, never
a penny in royalties. I am not suggesting that the sales were great
enough to pay for a steam yacht or a mansion on Fifth Avenue; but large
or small, I was treated to no definite report. The most that I could
obtain, after some unhappy sessions with Kline and Blum, was a document
signing all rights to the poem back to me. But sometime later, I had
reason to be glad even for this concession; chancing to observe the
books on the bargain counter of a large New York drug store, I was
astonished to see a familiar face: _The Lone Adventurer_, in a new
edition, with the original type and paper, but a reduced page-size and
a reduced price!

On inquiry, I was able to unravel the mystery. The cheap edition had
been put forth by the binders, who, being in possession of 500 or 1000
unbound copies which they had seized in partial satisfaction of the
debts owed by the Unicorn Press, had bound these at their own expense
and thrown them on the market. The last person to be considered, of
course, was the author; but as the author happened also to be the
copyright owner, he wrote to the binders, pointing out that they had
committed a copyright violation by an unauthorized act of publication;
and the binders, conceding the point, agreed to pay a royalty on the
books they had sold. Thus I came into possession of a small sum,
no more than fifty or a hundred dollars--the only case I have ever
known in which a poet, after going unpaid by his publisher, received
royalties from the publisher’s binders.

But perhaps all the above will further explain why I sought my living
by other forms of writing than poetry.

_The Lone Adventurer_, I will acknowledge, is a much less accomplished
work than I could wish; its theme and style, besides, would have
harmonized better with the age of Tennyson than with the staccato pace
of the day of jet planes and atomic power. Yet most themes and styles
are adjudged by the tastes of individuals rather than by absolute
standards; and this poem, with its basis in the quest for truth, has
always had a place in the affections of that highly prejudiced person,
its author. He has sometimes thought that he might someday revise it;
in fact, in _Garnered Sheaves_ (1949), he did present new versions of
a few short passages. Just in order to note the difference, whether
for better or for worse, it may be interesting to compare some of the
original stanzas with their later incarnations. Here, to begin with, is
an excerpt as printed in 1927:

Among the ice-crowned mountains to the west
Of Helmud’s empire, where the peaks of snow
Surmount the cloud-peaks, battered crest on crest,
And crookèd canyons ramble miles below,
Sometimes a sleety wind would snarl and blow
Round a slim figure that pursued alone
The snake-meanderings of a trail of stone.

* * * * *

And forlorn forests knew him, where the boughs
Made a dim twilight roof; and he would toil
Up rock-strewn summits, with a cave for house,
Where spitting geysers would erupt and boil
Amid scrub pines that sucked a beggared soil;
And in green bouldery gorges he would wander,
Where twisted streams poured with the roar of thunder.

And here are the same stanzas in the edition of 1949:

Among the ice-beaked mountains to the west
Of Helmud’s kingdom, where the spires of snow
Surmount the cloud-spires, pendent crest on crest,
And crab-armed canyons ramble worlds below,
Sometimes the sleet-wind and the rain would blow
Round a slim traveler who traced alone
The snaky wanderings of a trail of stone.

* * * * *

Wolf-threaded forests knew him, where the boughs
Gave noon a roof of twilight; he would toil
Up to the summits, with a cave for house,
Where spitting geysers bubble and fountains boil
Beneath scrub-pines that suck a beggared soil;
And in green gorges eagle-spaces under
Cascading streams that pour with the drone of thunder.

Another stanza may show the difference even more clearly:

And had he headed some rapacious band
To save the kingdom from its smaller foes,
And driven happy peoples from their land,
Slain babes and women with victorious bows
And left but ruins where had bloomed the rose--
Then fond disciples would have reared a shrine
Inscribed to “King Lodalga, the Divine.”

In the later form, this became:

And had he headed some fire-hurling band
To save the kingdom from its smaller foes,
Whipped screaming peoples from a smoking land,
Slain babes, felled women with bowel-ripping bows,
And left but ash-heaps where he found the rose,
Then fond disciples might have reared a shrine
Sacred to “King Lodalga, Lord Divine.”

There may be readers who would prefer the first versions, but these
examples will give some idea of the effect of revisions after more than
twenty years.

CHAPTER
TEN

Poets I Have Known

Inevitably, in the course of my adventures in poetry, I met other
poets, some of whom come back to mind with particular vividness--not
necessarily those I knew best or longest, but those whose individuality
makes them stand out most sharply.

To begin with, I think of a man whom I shall call Morris, and who has,
unhappily, made himself notorious. I first met him back in the fall of
1920, shortly after my arrival in New York. He was then the owner of
a small bookshop, near where the Sixth Avenue “L” trains thundered to
a halt at the station at Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. A proud,
handsome, insolent-looking, big-browed intellectual, he impressed me
with his announcement that a novel of his was to appear in the spring,
and that he was writing a book on current poetry (in what spring the
novel was published I do not know, but I am sure that the book on
poetry never made its bow). In the loneliness of my first months in
New York, I paid several visits to his shop, where I saw (but was not
introduced to) a number of literary celebrities, including Edna St.
Vincent Millay. I then lost track of Morris, until several years later,
when compiling _Modern American Lyrics_ I met him again in the office
of Earle Balch, who mentioned that he had some poems which might be
worth considering for my contemplated anthology.

Indeed they were worth considering! a series of well-wrought and
feeling sonnets dealing with remembrances of his native village in
Russia. These, I knew, were an acquisition for the anthology; and here,
I also knew, was a poet of unusual promise--promise, unhappily, not
to be fulfilled. For Morris chose to follow other roads than those of
poetry--roads leading toward ruin and disgrace. What was the flaw, the
weak link, the fatal trap within the personality of this intelligent
and capable man? That his thoughts should turn toward publishing was
not unnatural, in view of his bookish interests--but why, of all fields
of publishing, should he choose pornography as his particular area? In
his appearance, and in his conversations, he gave no suggestion of any
perverse tendencies--was it then that he was looking for an especially
lucrative source of income? I only know that he underwent successive
trials, convictions, and prison sentences, while perhaps the force of
circumstances or his own fierce and defiant nature forbade him to turn
to other channels--a good life and an able intellect largely lost, and
one more poet cast into the abyss.

Another memorable verse-writer, whom I never knew well but cannot
forget, was Anton Romatka--a man whose death some years ago was the
subject of wide newspaper publicity, not because his poetry was
notable, but because the facts of his life were extraordinary.

He was a man certain to impress you on sight: like a picture straight
out of a Victorian album, with his small figure, his round ruddy face,
his gold-rimmed spectacles over watery eyes, his blond side-whiskers
and long, drooping blond mustache, his small bow-tie, and high stiff
celluloid collar that gave a sort of European rigidity and formality
to his appearance. Romatka was a man who took poetry seriously--would
that there were more of his kind! Though his own offerings may have
been nothing to boast of, he did a real service for poets by the forum
which he provided for them in a hall on Fourteenth Street, somewhere
near Third Avenue. I can still see him, as he gravely, even ponderously
officiated, introducing the various poets in an English that perhaps
left something to be desired, but with a zeal in which nothing was
lacking: he was that rare poet who was less interested in reading his
own work than in providing means for others to read theirs. I can
recall various meetings, perhaps not greatly attended, but pervaded by
that spirit, that enthusiasm which is more important than numbers; he
made it possible for many different groups to be represented, as on the
occasion when Henry Hazlitt (then literary editor of the _Sun_, but
later known as a writer on economics) appeared in order to introduce
some of the _Sun’s_ local poets.

Alas, I fear that Romatka, though a good saint of poetry, was not
always appreciated. I know that he was a bit discouraged, as I was, on
that Sunday afternoon when he had asked me to appear at a Third Avenue
location to address a poetry group, and I found an audience of three in
addition to Romatka and myself. That was the last I ever saw of him;
but I know that he, with little or no means and handicapped by his
foreign appearance, speech, and mannerisms, did more in his humble way
for poetry than could be claimed by most of those who laughed slyly at
his oddities.

A man whom I knew far better, over a longer term of years, is likewise
a definite and memorable individual. In this case, for fear of
embarrassing him, I will not give the actual name, but will christen
him Jim Maynor. I first met him in the early twenties, and I knew from
the beginning that he was a real poet--though one whose production was
exceedingly scanty, and who would give more time to polishing a phrase
than other poets will take in completing a sonnet. At the time of our
first meeting, he had published a brochure of poems, one copy of which
he proudly presented to me--only to request its return sometime later
when, being engaged, he found that he had no copy to inscribe to his
fair one. His engagement, incidentally, had come about in true romantic
fashion: he had met the young lady in the lamp factory in which they
were both employed (he for a period of weeks only); and being treated
to a harrowing tale of how she was about to be locked out of the house
by a cruel stepfather named (believe it or not!) Proudfit, he rushed to
the rescue of her imperilled innocence, and promptly wooed and married
her, though neither of them had a penny put aside for bread or rent.

Jim Maynor, as you will divine from the above, was not one who cared
too much for the ways of this grubbing, mundane world. Not that he had
not tried often enough to conform with the dull laws of society, but
that something in his own nature forbade him to continue in any of a
long succession of jobs as librarian, postal carrier, book salesman,
department store clerk, caretaker in a city park, choir singer in a
church, and other occupations more numerous than I can recall. Finally,
during the depression days of the thirties, he found his vocation. At
least, he will swear to you that it _is_ his vocation; and, certainly,
it has given him greater contentment than any conventional job. More
than once, walking on the streets of New York, I have heard a strong
tenor voice wafted across a distance; and drawn toward the source of
the sound, I have seen Jim on a street or in the court of an apartment
house, an unsought minstrel bowing as he collected the pennies, dimes,
or quarters thrown him by passers-by or from windows above. On one
occasion, in a subway train, I heard that same voice; listened to the
strains of a sentimental song strangely competing with the crashing
tumult of the cars; and saw Jim approaching, raggedly dressed, and
smiling at me out of his thin, slightly worn, not unintelligent face.
In the eyes of the unappreciative world, this may seem like begging,
but not to Jim, who insists that he repays the people in pleasure for
every cent they throw to him--he is like one of the roving troubadours
of old, though born, unfortunately, a few hundred years too late.

The ways of the modern world, to be sure, are hard; the returns of
itinerant singing have not sufficed to cover the expenses of an
apartment in the Bronx, plus a wife and two children; and Jim has
had to supplement his income by occasional night-club singing and
by his wife’s wages from a downtown department store. But somehow
he has managed to exist. When I last saw him, a year or two ago, he
was browned from his outdoor activities; and looked well and happy.
Meanwhile he continues to write a rare poem, and never one without
quality.

A poet of a more volatile disposition, whom I knew even before my
first acquaintance with Maynor, became my friend owing to a letter
of introduction given me by a man I was never to see again, to a
woman I was to see but once. During my lonely first autumn in New
York, I did not refuse any chances for possible human contacts; one
Sunday afternoon found me in Brooklyn, at the home of the middle-aged
Sophie, whom a certain Jackson in California had insisted that I must
know. At Sophie’s apartment I met her much younger sister Bertha, a
quick-witted, dark-eyed, vivacious girl who might have passed for an
Italian, though she was actually a Russian Jewess; and there also I
met the tall, straight-limbed, flaming-eyed youth who, two or three
years later, was to become Bertha’s husband: Ignace M. Ingianni--the
“Ignace” being a mere decoration so far as I was concerned, for, like
all our mutual acquaintances, I never called him by any other name than
“Johnnie.” The son of an immigrant family, he had come to New York in
early childhood; and he showed all the volcanic fire of his Sicilian
origin. Despite our common poetic interests, he met me with prejudice,
I should almost say passionate antagonism; he had recently read one of
my poems in a Sunday paper, and had (doubtless justifiably) conceived
an intense dislike of it. Having disapproved of the poem, he likewise
disapproved of its author, even before seeing him; and his hostility
found expression in a roof-shaking argument, though not on poetry--no,
on warfare, whose advantages Johnnie defended in a tumult of words that
was almost like private warfare; while I, who have never been able to
see the militaristic point of view, answered him blow for blow during
a long, overheated debate. And what was the result? That we went our
way in mutual disgust, and saw no more of each other? Or that we became
lifelong enemies? On the contrary, the result was that we went our way
in mutual pleasure, and became lifelong friends.

Johnnie was, at the time I met him, a writer of free verse; my analysis
of his work, which I did not keep from him, was that it contained the
raw material of poetry but not the finished fabric. He would be able,
I suggested, to write good rhymed lyrics--and this proved to be the
case, as was shown by his subsequent poems that appeared in various
magazines, and in the volume _Songs of Earth_. Johnnie, who had passed
the bar examination but never practiced law, and earned his living
in the unlikely-seeming occupation of title examiner for the City of
New York, sometimes discussed with me the possibility of our joint
launching of a poetry magazine; but we never advanced further than
to decide on a title, _Flame_. When I actually did become the editor
and proprietor of a magazine, it was not known as _Flame_ (a title,
incidentally, later used by another poetry journal); and Johnnie was
not concerned with the enterprise except as an interested bystander and
occasional contributor.

But he himself was eventually to start his own magazine, and therein
rests an irony. Years later, after I had left New York and he had
come under new influences, he returned to the _vers libre_ of his
earlier days, but went beyond the freedoms of his earlier days, and
embraced that very extremism which I have always battled against. And
he launched the _avant-garde_ magazine, _Symbolica_, a mimeographed
periodical of irregular publication, to which he gives himself
devotedly, and for which he serves as typist and mimeographer no
less than as editor. Since therefore we are poetically at opposite
extremes--as far apart, let us say, as an atheist and a fundamentalist,
though I do not mean to compare us to either--what has happened to
our friendship? Nothing at all. I still see Johnnie from time to time
(for he has retired from his services to New York City, and moved
to California), and we still hold discussions with reminders of the
old-time fervor; but poetry is not among our topics of debate.

Whereas Johnnie has moved westward, another poet, whom I met in the
west, has since gone east. Our meeting was, I think, one of the
strangest and grimmest that ever paved the way for a friendship. During
the summer of 1930, Flora and I had come to California for our annual
vacation; and remembering the redwood forests and the far-looking hills
of Mill Valley, among which I had occasionally hiked while a youth at
college, I suggested that we rent a cottage there for a month. Flora,
little suspecting that she was to fall so deeply in love with the
environment as to wish to live there all the rest of her life, seemed
to think that two weeks would suffice; nevertheless, we did pass a
month, which seemed all too short, in two furnished rooms in the upper
story of a reconverted old church, from which we had a gratifying
view across a tree-clad range. Toward the end of our stay, we spent
a pleasant day with Anne Heller and another young woman, friends of
a New York friend of Flora’s, who were passing by on a hitch-hiking
expedition; and I remember how gay and carefree we were on the long
walk to Muir Woods via the green windings of the Pipe Line Trail, then
undesecrated by the demands of that modern devourer, the automobile. We
bade the travelers a hearty good-bye, little forseeing the sequel.

Two mornings later, as I picked up a San Francisco paper at a
newsstand, I was startled by the headlines: “HITCH-HIKER KILLED.” With
a shock, I glanced at the bold letters staring from the top of the
first page, and was almost felled to read--the name of Anne Heller.

That very evening, Anne was to reach out to us as if from beyond the
grave. I had gone to look for mail at the post office, when Flora heard
a rapping at the door, and opened to see two immaculately dressed
strangers: one a slender, tall, conspicuously handsome youth of about
twenty-seven; the other a short, dark-complexioned man in his forties,
severe and dignified of aspect, and with a European formality of manner.

Having made sure that they had come to the right door, the younger man
held forth an envelope. “Here,” he said, “is a letter of introduction
from Anne Heller.”

Flora gasped. “But don’t you know,” she blurted out, “don’t you know
Anne Heller is no longer here?”

The men gaped at her, speechless. Their eyes narrowed; tears trickled
down; they seemed ready to weep as Flora told the dread tidings in the
morning’s paper.

The letter from Anne--probably the last she ever wrote--had been given
to the younger man after a chance meeting with him the day before, the
very day that was to see her stretched bleeding and lifeless beneath
the wheels of a speeding automobile on a northern California highway.

Reeling, the men left with a few mumbled words, but not before
promising to get into further touch with us. This promise they kept;
and thus began a close friendship with them both, a friendship cemented
all the more firmly because of the sorrowful circumstances surrounding
its inception. The older man, the Portuguese Vice-Consul and for long
periods Acting Consul at San Francisco, bore the formidable name of
Guillermo de Amaral, but we got around the difficulty by simply calling
him “Bill”; the younger man, at that time an assistant at the Consulate
though he had no Portuguese blood, was Douglas V. Kane, who was truly
the poet that he looked, a sensitive being whose beauty-loving poems
have deservedly appeared in many magazines, and whom we have ever since
numbered among our dearest friends. Strange, strange that we should
have been brought together by Anne Heller, whom neither of us knew very
well, and who so suddenly and tragically departed from this earth so
many years ago.

Tragedy is also connected with another poet, whom I knew under totally
different circumstances. Not long ago a letter from Mary, the wife
of LeGarde S. Doughty, saddened us with the news of the death of her
husband--shot by his own hand. Perhaps it was only fitting that this
man, who lived turbulently, amid struggle and difficulty, should have
died violently. Across more than twenty years, a picture comes back
to me of a forceful, intelligent face, already deeply crisscrossed
and corrugated by life though the man could not have been beyond his
early forties. I see him in the only environment that somehow seems
appropriate: the pines of the Georgia hill-lands rising all about him
on soil too badly exhausted to bear any other crop; the red slash of
a road, which he told me was the celebrated “Tobacco Road,” rambling
among wild jasmine and honeysuckle and past houses that were mostly
mere unpainted shanties.

It was _Wings_ that brought me into contact with LeGarde, as with many
another able poet. During the early days of the magazine, I noticed the
strikingly original poems sent me under his name, and a correspondence
between us arose. At that time he was literary editor of the Augusta
_Chronicle_ (a post he subsequently lost owing to his free expression
of published opinion). Sometime in 1937 he first invited Flora and me
to visit Mary and himself in their home a few miles out of Augusta; and
in April, 1938, we were finally induced to accept. Neither of us will
ever forget those two days spent with them amid the pine-woods, in a
four-room cottage that lacked every modern invention from running water
to electricity, but that glowed and bubbled with laughter, good cheer,
and good talk, while we and LeGarde and Mary and their hospitable
southern friends and neighbors lingered over our coffee until the early
morning hours, poems were read, and heated discussions held. LeGarde,
a lover of nature, showed me with pride a young redwood and an acacia
which I had sent him from California, and which had taken root in the
southern soil; and as we rambled together past a beggarly field of
undernourished wheat or out along the rutted road, he took as much joy
in the red earth of his pine-lands as if they had represented Eden
itself.

But how did he manage to subsist in that infertile territory? I never
knew for certain. I do recall his delight, at the very hour of our
departure, when a letter from a mid-western magazine contained a check
for $75 for a story just accepted; and I know that he published other
stories and one novel. But could he support himself on the slim reed
of literature? I am afraid that he could not; and I suspect that the
many rebuffs he received, along with the never-healing wound from the
loss of a dearly beloved son in an air accident in World War II, lay
in the background of his tragic end. His one published book of poetry,
a slim collection of quatrains issued in 1934, bears the suggestive
title, _With Lips of Rue_--a title expressive not only of the man’s
work but of the man himself. Yet I have always believed that here was
one who, had life been a little less difficult and fortune a bit more
beneficent, might have been among the luminaries of American poetry if
not of American prose.

Now and then, while making new poetic friends, I was being reintroduced
to old. I recall an occasion in the early thirties when some members
of Hal Bynner’s one-time poetry class held a reunion with Hal in an
old farmhouse at Nyack, where we all stayed overnight. This event,
perversely, stands out in my memory not so much because of the
reestablishment of old bonds as for a certain ride which I would not
re-enact for the joy of all the reunions on earth. Now that I look back
upon it, it seems almost incredible, and I know that it might have been
disastrous--but great are the risks and trials that one will undergo in
the name of poetry, particularly when one is young and not too wary!

It was a cold evening in early February, and the snow lay on the
ground. At an appointed time after dinner, Flora and I went to an
address on Forty-Second Street, where we met two other guests, who were
to drive us to Nyack. So far, so good! and having the inconvenient
habit of being on time, we arrived at the agreed hour, and were
rewarded with a long wait before the journey began. We were, I must
admit, just a little taken aback when we saw the intended means of
transportation! a broken-down old two-seated automobile, repainted a
chilly aluminum, and completely open and exposed in the rear. Had we
known then what we knew an hour or two later, one or both of us would
instantly have developed chills, or pains in the stomach, or some other
appropriate indisposition. But no! two complaisant if somewhat dubious
people took their assigned back seats in the automobile.

The beginnings of the trip, before we had reached the New Jersey side
of the Hudson, are drowned out of memory by what happened after we had
crossed the river and began following the curves of the road along the
ridge of the Palisades. We had never before had the faintest idea how
cold a February night could be. It may be that the temperature was
not many degrees below freezing, but I would have sworn that sixty
below zero could not have seemed colder as the unimpeded north winds,
edged like the shivery blades of knives and amplified in effect by the
speed of the car, swept over us from across the wide dark vacancies
of the river. Flora and I shrank down as low as possible, trying to
sink into our seats, so as to lessen the cutting power of the gale;
we huddled together, beat each other on the back so as to bring back
some semblance of warmth. Though dressed in our heaviest--Flora in a
thick brown beaver-cloth coat that made her look like a bear but was
really not fur at all, and I in my most ponderous woolen coat--we both
felt clad in cheese-cloth, if not actually naked in that boundless
cold. The frigid air beat at our skins, caressed us, numbed us, and
there was no defense, no way of escape. For what seemed hours, endless
hours, that tormented drive continued. They tell me that the distance
to Nyack is not more than about forty miles; but it seemed hundreds,
it seemed infinity itself; each second of torture was minutes long,
and the seconds were innumerable. Comparing notes afterwards, we found
that our thoughts were similar. “This _is_ hell,” Flora had been saying
to herself. “This truly _is_ hell.” And I had been trying to comfort
myself with the bleak reflection, “The fundamentalist preachers were
all wrong. Hell is not heat and fire. Hell is ice and cold.”

But terrible as was the puffing, panting progress of that tumbledown
old car against the blasts of the polar night, a still more appalling
possibility lowered before us. What if the ancient engine should
break down, and we should be stranded here on the frozen plateau?
Automobiles, I knew, had a habit of stalling at the most inconvenient
times--as, for example, the one that had balked in mid-journey when
bearing Flora and me to the railroad station just after we were
married. And if we were to face the full force of the wind, perhaps for
hours, unprotected on that lonely night-road--

Here, however, imagination outleapt reality. Finally, after crawling
ages, we did reach our destination, so numb that we could hardly walk;
we did share in the joy of the expected reunion; we did warm ourselves
before a blazing fire, whose heat we could hardly get enough of--a fire
that was our salvation, though I have always marveled that neither of
us came down with pneumonia.

Ever since that night, it has been my view that there are torments
which it is not worth while to endure even for the sake of poetry. And
it has likewise been my belief--with which, I am sure, Flora would
concur--that when the devil wishes to punish some especially wicked
sinner, he entices him forth to the top of a cliff in an open car on an
icy night in February.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Shadows on a Wall

Publishing mishaps, as more than one writer will testify, do not always
occur singly. This was true in my own case in 1927, the year that
saw my misadventures with _The Lone Adventurer_. In that same year,
I put forth another book, _The Literary Revolution_, a critical work
dealing with the changes that had overcome literary standards, both
in poetry and prose. This volume, which has assuredly fled long ago
from everyone’s memory (and almost from that of its author) was issued
by an establishment called Frank-Maurice, Inc.--one of those concerns
which are not necessarily less worthy or successful because the same
man is owner, manager, and editor, and may in fact insure closer
author-publisher relationships and better attention to the individual
book. But the one-man house suffers from this serious drawback: it is
in danger of paralysis if anything happens to its guiding spirit.

And that is just what, unhappily, did befall Frank-Maurice. The head
of the firm--it would be no exaggeration to say, the firm itself--was
an aging, scholarly man named Rosenblatt; but he was not too old, nor
apparently in bad health. Therefore it was with a stunning shock that
one day, shortly after the appearance of my book, I stepped into his
office and learned that Rosenblatt was dead. His passing had been
very sudden--perhaps due to a coronary occlusion, though I doubt if
that term was much in use then. But whatever the cause, he was gone;
and with him died the firm of Frank-Maurice. There were, it is true,
some lawyers and others to supervise the post-mortem, and give what
accounting they could to authors; but the wheels had ground to a halt;
sales campaigns had ended, and so had sales, and the whole organization
was rapidly dissolved. I was, of course, not the only author affected,
nor probably the one most affected, and it is unlikely that _The
Literary Revolution_ would in any circumstances have kindled more
than the mildest of blazes. But the effect was a little like that of
having a horse in a race, even though not an expected prize-winner,
and of seeing it stumble and fall just after the starting signal.
This, of course, was just one of the occupational hazards of authors.
And occupational hazards, as I think everyone will agree, are easy to
endure--when they overtake others.

In _The Literary Revolution_, I said much the same things about poetry
as in my unpublished _Poetic Revival in America_; and aimed my blows,
as often in later days, against those persons who either wilfully or
out of ignorance were confusing poetry and prose, and so threatening
to destroy poetry as a separate form of creation. A typical passage
follows:

If Mark Twain, as a whimsical bit of humor, had chopped one of his
prose articles into fantastic form, commenced each line with a
capital letter, and labelled the whole poetry, he would have been
attempting in jest what some of the writers of today are undertaking
seriously. And if he had declared that he was guided by rules known
only by himself, and that the ear which could take pleasure in
Shelley and Swinburne was not always delicate enough to value him
correctly, he would have been foreshadowing the attitude of the free
versifiers. The difference is that he would have been greeted with
laughter, whereas the free versifiers are sometimes accorded a more
sober approval.

In another passage, I call attention to the basic distinction between
prose and poetry. I point out that “Prose is the vehicle for the
ordinary expression of ideas, poetry for their artistic expression”;
that “Artistic creation must always imply restraint,” the remoulding of
“the gross material of inartistic expression into the sharply defined
and chiselled product of art.” Always before our own day, poetic
technique has been the means of consummating this end. But this fact
never seems to occur at all to the apostles of the new school:

They ask for freedom, and forget that freedom is not the way of art;
they clamor to express an idea untrammeled by convention, and fail to
remember that the only vehicle permitting such liberty is prose. They
demand all the rights of the prose writer, and shrink from all the
duties of the poet--and yet they call their productions poetry.

If called upon to amend these lines today, I should not limit myself to
saying that the spokesmen of the new freedom “demand all the rights of
the prose writer.” I should add that they ask rights no prose writer
has ever required, sometimes including the privilege of expressing
themselves with an incoherence, a turgidness, or a ranting effusiveness
that would earn nothing but laughter if offered as straight prose.
Imagine, for example, what would happen to any writer of prose who took
the liberties assumed by Dylan Thomas in lines such as these:

Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream....

My point, of course, is that our verse writers have claimed such
additional liberties since 1927 that criticism which might then have
seemed startlingly radical is much too tame to express the present
situation.

After _The Literary Revolution_--which produced far less than a
revolution in literature--about three years went by before I attempted
any further book publication connected with poetry. Then one day I
entered the office of _The Poet’s Magazine_ and _Poetic Publications_
in a large downtown building, and had a talk with the proprietor,
George Sakele, a dark-skinned somber man with an Oriental cast of
countenance. Looking back on _Poetic Publications_, I think that it was
truly the most curious institution that ever attempted to purvey poetry
to an indifferent public. Was Mr. Sakele himself a poet or critic? If
he was--at least, in anything but the most private way--that fact never
came to my attention. He ran his poetic enterprises, if the strange
truth must be confessed, in connection with his sale of cosmetics;
his speciality was some sort of an alleged Egyptian cream for women’s
skins, which he advertised over the radio as akin to that in which
Cleopatra used to bathe (price, five dollars a bottle). I shall never
forget the sickly sweet odor with which it pervaded his office. Poetry
to him was evidently a hobby, though I have always wondered why he did
not pick something simpler, such as stamp-collecting; in any case, he
did indubitably publish a magazine, with the aid of a young employee
named Dorothy Gretzner; and he did also publish books--which was the
occasion of my visit to him.

Even in those days, a young poet in search of a publisher could not
always be too critical--not if the publisher was willing to assume the
financial responsibility. Just now I have been wondering just what sort
of a contract Sakele could have offered me; and burrowing back in my
files, I have looked for the first time in many years at the one-page
agreement, which, mercifully free of small-print provisos and legal
_ifs_, _whats_, and _moreovers_, proceeds in the simplest language
to state that the publisher will issue the book in an edition of not
less than 1,000 copies, take out the copyright in the author’s name,
and “pay the author a royalty of 10% on the retail price of all copies
sold.”

On the basis of later experience, I cannot help wondering how many
of the stipulated “edition of not less than 1,000 copies” Mr. Sakele
ordered to be bound. I also wonder how he expected to sell any copies
at all--a department in which his success appears to have been much
less notable than in the distribution of Egyptian face-creams.
Nevertheless, in order to obtain an agreement such as he gave me,
many an aspiring poet would, I am sure, overlook all dubious factors,
including the face-creams.

True, there were several peculiarities about my second collection
of short poems, _Shadows on a Wall_. The least was that the binder,
evidently running out of cloth or wishing to get rid of some scraps,
completed various copies in different shades of blue and brown.
Another peculiarity, which likewise troubled me but little, sprang
from Sakele’s theory that no poem should occupy more than one page; in
consequence of this unique idea, which would have run into difficulties
in the case of _Locksley Hall_ or _The Ancient Mariner_, a sequence of
three sonnets was crowded into page 27 in minute unspaced eight-point
type, whereas most of the poems were printed in amply spaced ten-point.
But what really did annoy me was the typographical error in the poem,
_A Thousand Years From Now_. Preceding the first line, “Above the ruins
that were once New York,” these irrelevant words from another poem
appear: “Whose blade was sharp and strong.”

I was sure that, whatever mistakes may have escaped my proofreading
eyes--and many have escaped them, before and since--such an intrusion
would have glared at anyone not wholly blind. And I was not at all
consoled when a friend, commenting on the error, assured me that
some day this flaw would make the book all the more valuable--as a
collector’s item. If there is any logic in this reasoning, I ought
to regret that the book did not commend itself to collectors by more
disfigurations, and more serious ones.

The title of the collection, which was never one of my favorites, was
supplied by the opening quatrain:

Our lives are shadows cast along a wall
By writhing flames that wave-like rear and fall.
The shadows deepen, and the flames droop low;
The embers smolder, and the shadows go.

I quote this not as anything I take pride in, but on the contrary,
because it is something I should not be disposed to write today. It
represents a pessimistic--and, I believe now, a shallow view which I
was inclined to take sometimes in my brooding earlier days. I believe
now, and believe profoundly, that there is more to life than the
leaping and subsiding of flames and of the shadows they throw on a
wall; but the fact that I could once have written these lines, and
even picked them as the title poem of a collection, strikes me as an
indication of the extent of the changes that have overtaken some of my
general views during a period when my ideas as to poetry and the making
of poetry have been little altered.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

The Depression, the Sea,
and the Redwoods

The great worldwide depression, beginning in 1929, cast few immediate
visible reflections in poetry. I was but one of many who had no idea
of letting our crumbling economic foundations undermine their poetic
foundations. Like others, I continued writing verse, gratified whenever
any magazine saw the light clearly enough to open its doors to me.

The names of some that did open their doors--_The Bookman_, _The
Independent_, _The World Tomorrow_, _Shards_, _The Wanderer_,
etc.--read like a list of the bygone and forgotten. But even then, as
more recently, I sent a majority of my offerings to the metropolitan
newspapers. And why? First, as a matter of convenience. The typing of
poems, the keeping of records, the very selection of manuscripts to
send, require more time and effort than you would suppose. And when one
is preoccupied with multitudes of duties, it is sometimes impossible to
find time for repeated submissions--particularly as manuscripts, when
they come back, are usually dogeared, soiled, dented with paper clips,
or even burned by cigarettes, though not many of them may suffer the
fate endured by one of my book manuscripts, which was dropped down an
elevator shaft. In most cases, poems must be retyped: that is, unless
one wishes to say to the editor, in effect, “Others didn’t think these
worth keeping, but maybe you’re an easier target.”

Because of such difficulties, the poet naturally submits where his
chances are greatest. And if his chances are, let us say, anywhere from
about twenty-five to ninety-eight per cent or more with newspapers
where his work is known, but perhaps no more than two or three per cent
with large magazines that use but few poems and hence reject more, the
decision may be automatically made for him. In the course of the years,
I contributed literally hundreds of poems to the New York _Sun_ (a
luminary that, unfortunately, has long gone out), while the editors of
the _Times_ and other papers were very receptive.

You may say, of course, that newspaper publication is ephemeral--come
today, gone tomorrow! And this no doubt is true, but it is likewise
true to a degree of all periodical publication. And, besides, there
is always the possibility of reprints; and many people will clip the
poems they like and preserve them for years. I do not, in any case,
share the supercilious, the almost snobbish contempt which some poets
profess toward newspaper publication; no means of distribution that
reaches a wide general audience should be disdained. And knowing what I
do of poets, and of literary sour grapes, I may perhaps be pardoned for
wondering if those who cry out loudest may not have built their scorn
on a deep foundation of rejection slips.

But to turn back to the depression era. During this very period my own
work, as if perversely ignoring the world’s dejected state, burst forth
in new veins, and with a character which, in my own biased opinion, it
had not had before--a character that arose largely from my new contacts
with nature.

To begin with a transient phase, there was my response to the sea
during a particular voyage--a voyage whose exceptional circumstances
were directly concerned with the depression. There are millions who
will never forget how President Roosevelt, almost immediately after
taking office in 1933, closed the banks of the country, and thereby
averted national catastrophe. There are also millions who will remember
how, even if they had money in theory, they had none in practice except
what their pockets contained, since they could not draw upon their bank
accounts. That such a situation, with all its painful accompaniments,
could have had any connection with the writing of poetry, and
particularly of poetry of the sea--this, surely, would seem among the
most fantastic of impossibilities. Yet the connection, at least in my
own case, did exist.

It happened that Flora and I had elected March of that very year
for a badly needed vacation, and decided upon the extravagance of
a cruise into southern waters. We had reserved, but still had not
paid for, accommodations on the Swedish liner _Kungsholm_, and were
expecting to leave sometime in the second week of the month ... when
lo! the bombshell exploded. The banks faced us with shut doors! For
all practical purposes, we were penniless! I remember counting all
our available cash, which came to no more than twenty dollars. As for
paying for the tickets--that was impossible; checks could not pass
through the clearing house, and therefore, for the time being, were
worthless. Under these circumstances, most travelers did the obvious,
and cancelled their passages. But Flora and I did not quite so easily
give up our precious vacation; I telephoned the steamship line, and
was informed, to my surprise, that the _Kungsholm_ would sail at the
scheduled time; the company would accept my check in payment of our
passage; and would cash any further checks for any reasonable amounts
so that we might have pocket money _en route_.

Flora and I, accordingly, were among the passengers--the very few
passengers--who stood staring shoreward from the _Kungsholm_ on that
bitterly cold morning when she sailed. The vessel, a capacious liner
of around 30,000 tons, was all but deserted; it was possible to stroll
completely around the promenade deck without encountering a soul. And
this, though it did not make for sociability, was ideal for poetry; one
could read and muse and dream, undisturbed as if one were the steamer’s
sole owner, while day after day she made her way across the glorious
cobalt-blue Caribbean. I remember that my almost constant companion was
A. E.’s _Collected Poems_; and the lyrical and mystical mood of these
verses helped to put me into the right state of mind for writing. The
fruit of the voyage, therefore, was a series of _Sea Sketches_, eleven
of which were to appear in my book _The Merry Hunt_. The mood of these
poems, though no two are alike, may be illustrated by the opening of
the ninth of the sequence:

A sadness rises in my breast,
I cannot answer how nor why,
When, low against a shoreless sky,
A ship goes down into the west
Beneath the day’s red closing eye.

Slowly it turns from dusk to dark,
With dwindling masts and hull a-gleam,
And, where the firelit hazes stream,
Fades in the vastness, spark by spark,
And passes softly as a dream....

Such stanzas can be written only in a mood of detachment. And
detachment is not possible amid the chatter of crowds and the riot of
merrymaking. Therefore I have always held that the great depression,
culminating in the national financial disaster that forced the closing
of the banks, was responsible for something seemingly so remote from
economic affairs as my lyrics of the sea.

But deeply as the sea has moved me, my poetry found richer sustenance
in the great earth-world of growing things, of hills and mountains,
forests and streams. These, ever since I have come to know them, have
seemed my natural domain; more than once, coming west on the train
after a long stay in New York, I have glowed at my first glimpse of the
great snow-line of the Rockies as at the sight of approaching home.
Strangely, though I lived in a mountainous state, I did not know the
mountains in childhood--not until, just before my seventeenth birthday,
I registered as a student at Berkeley, and almost immediately headed
for the hills, and took long walks, companioned or alone--though more
often alone--to the far-looking eminence of Grizzly Peak and its
rolling neighbors.

But while these invigorating strolls did result in some attempts at
poetry, nature reserved her greatest gifts until the years beginning
with 1930, when Flora and I came every summer to Mill Valley (where we
finally settled in 1938). Our daily routine, enforced only by our own
desires during those charmed months when we were free from the grind
of a great city, was ideal for verse-writing. Nearly every morning,
after two or three hours which I devoted to various writing tasks,
Flora and I would set out with a bag containing a lunch of sandwiches
and fruit, one or more books, and a second bag holding paper, pens,
and pencils. For an hour or two we would wind in fog or sunlight or
beneath the shadow of leaves along one of the many trails looping among
the redwoods or across the bush-grown slopes to Muir Woods or to some
point high on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where we might have lunch in
some sheltered ferny grotto to the purling music of clear waters, or
stare across wide vistas of tawny hill and blue sea and bay, or up at
the two-hundred-foot towers of the sequoias, with their cinnamon-brown
boles and down-slanting scented limbs. The clear exhilaration, the
shining joy of those walks, is something I have tried, perhaps not
successfully, to put into verse. And the many sights and sounds of the
wayside offered material for poetry--a dragonfly, a crested bluejay,
a crawfish in a stream, a water Strider, a mountain flower, a rock, a
weed, a redwood grove.

My poems of the woods, in the vast majority of cases, were written in
the woods, with my eyes on the objects described. Many a day, while
Flora sat not many feet off with a book or with pen and letter paper, I
lay stretched out beneath the trees, in a state of relaxation in which
I was as close as possible to being unaware of my physical being; and
let the lines of a poem form themselves in my mind--lines which I would
never put down until the complete composition had come to me. Whatever
the quality of the resulting verses, I know that I could reach into
depths rarely if ever plumbed in the city, and could write with an
undistracted absorption that made it possible to call upon the inmost
reserves of my being.

Among the products of those summer strolls, I number the lyrics in
_Songs of the Redwoods_, and most of the poems of nature in subsequent
books. In those poems there is a simplicity that may be deceptive, a
simplicity my earlier work had not always possessed, as when I express
my gratitude and relief at returning to nature:

I have been long an exile from the sod,
The firm gray earth that dusty feet may tread,
The earth where one may lay a tired head
As on the lap of God.

My sense of the timelessness of the woods and hills, in contrast to the
impermanence of man, is expressed in various offerings, as in the lyric
from _Green Vistas_, beginning:

The woods shall not be lonely
When man has slipped away,
Leaving no token, only
Dark timbers that decay,

and in the sonnet that opens:

These hills, where silence with her ancient humming
Speaks to the green-plumed ridge and picture-sky,
Echo no creeds of getting or becoming,
No Parliaments that shout, no men that die.

Amid the gratifying vastness of nature, I have often had the sense of
the loss of personal identity in a greater, more meaningful identity:

Firm-pillowed on the earth, with head to grass,
And all the hot sky arching over me,
Almost I seem to merge with the great mass
Of root, and rock, and pinnacle, and tree.
Almost I seem to lose the “I,” the one,
And blend with currents of the bush and stóne,
And with the flowing air, the soil and sun,
And be no more self-clouded and alone.

The reader will, I hope, bear with me for thus quoting my own verses,
since these lines express the nature of my experience and the sources
of my poetry much more vividly than my prose could do.

For eighteen successive summers, during some of which my time was
absorbed by long poems--from 1930 to 1947--Flora and I took those long
and stimulating, almost daily walks into the hills; in the latter years
we were accompanied by our romping black-tan-and-white toy shepherd
dog, “Sheppie,” herself the unwitting source of more than one poem.
Only with our removal to a home higher in the hills and further from
the hiking trails did our regular pilgrimages to the woods come to an
end; and then my poems of nature, while not ceasing, became much less
frequent.

There is today, I realize, a movement away from poetry of nature--a
movement only to be expected in a world which is itself withdrawing
from nature, a world of concrete strips and macadamized landscapes,
a world of super-highways that rip down the wilderness as a gardener
pulls out a weed, a world of power-madness symbolized by the bulldozer
that slashes out the very soil and makes deserts of once-blossoming
fields and green hillsides. What communion with nature can be expected
by the worried dweller in an apartment house, who sees nature at
most for two or three weeks a year through the windshield of a
sixty-mile-an-hour car on a six-lane freeway, or in the overcrowded
camps of one of our national parks? How much of nature is observed
by the dweller among the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, Houston,
or St. Paul? How much of nature even among the methodically trimmed
lawns and neatly curving concrete roads of our suburban districts?
Lovers and viewers of nature there may still be, but they are a
dwindling minority. And that is why city sophisticates, bleary-eyed
with gazing at neon lights and television screens, increasingly tend
to scoff at poetry of nature as something unreal, unfelt, sentimental,
or derivative; they do not realize that no man has the right to deny
another man’s experience, nor that in a world where color-blindness was
the rule, the majority would consider themselves wise for mocking the
viewers of rainbowed tints.

But poetry of nature is real, and will continue to be real, because
it is built upon realities that antedated man and will no doubt
outlast him; we can no more forbid it by critical mandate than we can
proscribe poetry of joy or sorrow, religion or love. What we have a
right to ask of the poet of nature, as of all writers, is that the
impulse behind his work be genuine; that the poems be based upon actual
experience, actual observation, actual feelings, and not be drawn
from his readings of other poets. But whether or not he is able to
communicate the impressions that come to him, whether his incentive
is equalled by his skill, or whether his message is acceptable or
even understandable--these are questions to be decided by that great
eventual arbiter to whose judgment all creators must yield themselves.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Year of Miracles

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:

For half of man’s allotted years and more
I ranged the highways of this worried earth
Like some long pilgrim from a distant shore,
Baffled by men of foreign speech and birth.
I scarcely seemed to share
The fires, the swords and fevers of my land,
Was blinded when they saw, and saw when they were blind.

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:

... to achieve its full power and effectiveness ... poetry must have
an audience schooled to receive it--and it is precisely here that the
modern world fails most signally, and that a magazine such as _Wings_
may play its most beneficial role....

So far as possible, _Wings_ will devote itself ... to the
encouragement of the poetic spirit; it will provide a medium for the
publication of the best poetry, and the best poetry only, regardless
of the name or reputation of the author; it will open a critical
arena for views and reviews on subjects pertaining to its special
field....

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.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Trials and Rewards of an Editor

Men of experience will tell you that nothing is much more difficult
than launching a new periodical. With a large staff, persistent
efforts, capable planning, and an ample budget, including immense sums
for advertising, it is sometimes possible to put a new magazine into
the field. But what, when no staff at all is available, and no funds
for advertising except through occasional circulars? This, in general,
is the situation for all poetry magazines, at least those not backed
by bountiful grants; and _Wings_, therefore, represented the rule and
not the exception. Of course, no poetry magazine aims at corralling its
readers by the millions; hundreds of subscribers look as numerous to
its publishers as hundreds of thousands would appear to the proprietor
of a more popular sheet; and there is no thought of the vast business
arrangements necessary for its larger cousins.

The distinction, however, runs even deeper than this, for whereas
the profit motive rules in most periodicals, it does not apply at
all for a poetry magazine. There is no profit motive, since there
is no prospect of a profit--I would not say, “no possibility,” for
I know that _Wings_, which for long periods has achieved the feat
of breaking almost if not quite even, one year actually earned a
surplus of $95.13. Of course, such a banner success is rare; and the
publisher, not expecting much if anything but debts to be left when the
year is over, must necessarily subordinate the profit motive to the
as-little-loss-as-possible motive.

Having made this dire confession, I must go on to report that _Wings_
was from the first an unexpected success. I say “unexpected,” for I had
not known what to anticipate, and had listened just a little doubtfully
to Flora’s prediction that the magazine would succeed. But let me point
out that it seems to me that the idea of success has been grossly,
vulgarly, ignorantly entangled in modern thought with the concept of
financial gain: few of the great successes of history, from Confucius
to Kant, and from Homer to Goethe, and Galileo to Einstein, and Gautama
to Gandhi, are in any way memorable for monetary triumphs. Not that
the motive behind a poetry magazine may be compared with the impulse
that ruled any of these great figures, but that they all have at least
one thing in common: their guardian star has been something other
than money. The pecuniary status of a poetry magazine is, of course,
irrelevant--irrelevant, that is, to anything but the owner’s pocket, a
matter of no importance at all to the world at large. What is relevant
is whether the effort has helped the cause of art or creation, whether
it has broadcasted pleasure or inspiration, whether it has aided
aspiring and worthy writers and given them a platform from which to be
heard.

Before many issues of _Wings_ were out, approving letters, often
accompanied by subscriptions, were arriving from all parts of the
country; and floods of contributions, many of them from persons I had
never heard of before, began to be addressed to “Editor, _Wings_.” Not
that the great majority were of much value; but how eagerly I pored
through the piles, hoping to unearth the rare divine contribution! I
will not say that my search brought to light any latter-day Milton,
or any new _Ode on a Grecian Urn_ or _Ode to the West Wind_; but many
gratifying contributions were contained in those growing heaps of long
envelopes, including poems that, I still believe, are of enduring
value, though often the author was unknown and in some cases remains
unknown.

I shall never forget, for example, the glow of discovery when Mary
Cecile Ions, writing from Coral Gables, Florida, submitted to a _Wings_
contest her twelve-stanza poem, _Letter to the Dead in Spring_,
beginning:

Do not be fretful of your old repose
Though April sunlight warm your hearts’ dust through
And fragrance of the everlasting rose
Assail the grave and penetrate to you.

Who was Mary Cecile Ions? I do not know, except that she had graduated
from the University of Alabama with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and
subsequently taught English and French. But I cannot say what else
she has accomplished, and in fact have seen little of her work.
Nevertheless, the poem, which the judges agreed in putting first of
all the submissions, has clung to my memory. I was gratified when the
well-known British anthologist Thomas Moult confirmed our good opinion
by reprinting it in _The Best Poems of 1935_; and ten years later, I
had no hesitation in giving it a place in my own anthology, _The Music
Makers_.

Or take the case of Otto Freund. Although he had contributed to various
magazines, I had known nothing of him or his work until he began
sending me, from Portland, Oregon, a series of poems of unusual depth
and accomplishment. Rarely, for example, does one come across four
lines with the finality of _Requiescat_, written in memory of John
Barrymore:

Unanswered encores, rue, and requiems sung,
Forgetful dust, the turning of a page,
But still the voice of Hamlet rings among
The silent galleries and an empty stage.

Whole elegies are contained in the above; and whole volumes of grief
are compressed in _Heart Wound_:

The wound is healed, but still the pain is there,
And stabs with anguish, like a sudden sword,
When sunlight feigns the spun gold of her hair,
Or music finds her lost voice in a chord.

With sorrow I report that Otto Freund has silently dropped out of
the fold. One day, many years ago, he wrote me that he was leaving
for the east; he did not mention any reason, nor give any forwarding
address--and that is the last I have heard of him or his work, though I
have never ceased to regret his disappearance.

Or consider Francis Vaughan Meisling. All that I know of him is that he
was a journalist and foreign correspondent, who sent me a single poem
from Los Angeles. And yet this poem, _I Dreamt She Came_, has a real
lyrical quality--the sort that makes an editor feel that his labors
have not been wholly in vain:

I dreamt she came as fire and as rose,
Fragrance and light, and leaning o’er my head
Whispered those burning words none other knows
And took between her hands my peaceless head;

And kissed. There was a movement in the air
As if the blossoms of the year had blown
Their petals and their odors round us there,
As I awoke, as I awoke alone.

Next my mind goes back to Celia Keegan, a Long Island girl whose work,
as in the case of Miss Ions, I first noticed among the submissions
in a contest, though I afterwards met her at a gathering of _Wings_
contributors in my apartment in New York. She sent _Wings_ some of the
most poignant poems of love I can remember; I cannot forbear quoting
the whole of _Renunciation_:

How more than blind the hooded fates to weave
So sere a skein; to wing two hearts with fire
Of ecstasy and melody ... then leave
To human wills the quenching of desire!
I did not hide love from your loving eyes,
Nor do I whisper nobly, “I will go,”
Then teach my lips such trite and songless lies
As, “Happiness will come through doing so.”
This way I give you up: Against the blades
Rebellion lifts in myriad array,
I raise a sword whose clean strength surges ... fades ...
And wins again ... till I have cut my way
Past you, and love, and toward Tomorrow’s mark
Go stumbling, stricken, blinded, through the dark.

Miss Keegan, like Mr. Freund, vanished suddenly from my ken, and
likewise from that of some mutual friends, who heard their last from
her about twenty years ago. Whither has she gone? To join the songbirds
of last spring?

Then there was the case of Florence Wilson Roper, formerly of
Petersburg, Virginia, but now deceased, whose poems had first attracted
me in the pages of the Dallas verse magazine, _Kaleidograph_, and who
won one of the annual book-publishing awards of that periodical. She
too contributed many moving poems of love, and many reflective pieces,
as in the sequence of five sonnets, _Retrospect_, with some exquisite
lines, such as

Remembering! It has a pleasant sound
Like water falling softly over stone--
A phantom hand that holds with fleshless bone
The present, past and future firmly bound!

But I have set out to write a narrative, and not to compile an
anthology, and cannot go on to quote other excerpts. In any case, the
occasional discovery of such material, more than anything else, made me
feel that _Wings_ was indeed serving a purpose, and might be accounted
a modest success.

Meanwhile, with the feeling of an inexperienced rider clutching at
a balky steed, I was attempting to manage the new enterprise. The
second and third issues were put forth in California, by a printer
recommended by Arthur Chamberlain; but the following issues, during my
remaining five years in New York and even for a time afterwards, all
proceeded from the metropolis. But in New York, aside from Mr. Post’s
connections, I knew no printer. I tried one who, due to an error,
trimmed the magazine down so far as to give it a truncated appearance;
I tried another, who inked the pages so badly that they were painful
to read; and then one day, not knowing where to turn, I walked into
the office of a small establishment in Washington Heights, the Artype
Press, and made arrangements with its proprietor, Paul Grossman. Though
picked merely by chance, he proved to be conscientious and capable, and
did a good job so long as geographical considerations made it possible
to leave the printing in his hands.

I need hardly add that our agreement provided for a price which, in
these more expensive days, would hardly suffice for printing more than
a few pages of _Wings_. Had present-day rates prevailed, I would have
been blocked by unscalable walls, even before I started. And this
makes me wonder as to the fate today of editors in approximately my
former position. I should like to know just how the development of art,
literature, and culture in general may be affected by our “higher”
standards of living and the accompanying higher standards of inflation.

But let me go back to my problems as an editor. They were to be many,
and seasoned with curious vicissitudes. Not a few of them, as I suppose
is true for most editors, were to proceed from the daily mailbag, which
was in a sense a grab-bag, since I never knew what I would pull out
of it. In the course of the years, there were to be many sweet and
beautiful letters, which I would value as among the chief compensations
of an editor’s task; but there were also to be letters of various other
types.

I will never forget, for example, the lady who mailed me a sentimental
lyric on _The Old Plush Sofa_, and accompanied the manuscript with
a strip of purple velvet. “I thought you might appreciate the poem
better,” she obligingly wrote, “if you had a piece of the sofa before
you.”

Again, there was the correspondent who, having sent me a page-long list
of all the places where his work had appeared, from the Newtown High
School _Quarterback_ to the Green Plains _Meteor_, followed it two
days later with an air-mail apology: one of his poems had not actually
seen the light in the _New Age Hardwareman_, as he had absent-mindedly
declared; it had blossomed forth in the _New Era Hardwareman_.

Another case, which also earned an editorial smile, was that of the
verse-writer who wrote in from a small Canadian town. He hoped I would
publish his poems, but if so, would I not kindly pick a _nom de plume_?
The reason, he explained, was that he could not let it be known that he
wrote poetry: he was one of his city’s policemen.

Then occasionally a would-be contributor has sent a letter of several
single-spaced typewritten pages, or, worse still, in largely illegible
handwriting, devoted to personal reminiscences interlarded with
questions. As well as I could, I have usually answered the questions,
if they pertained to poetry; but time and eye-power are limited--and
more than once an oversight has brought me another letter, of almost
equal length, in which I am properly reproved: “Dear Editor: You have
not answered the question in the third paragraph of the fourth page of
my last note....”

The editor of a poetry magazine, I soon discovered, is regarded as the
chief clerk of a public bureau of consultation and criticism, whose
duty is not only to answer questions, but to give advice, and comment
on manuscripts--all, of course, absolutely without compensation (not
even in gratitude, since frank criticism is likely to win one nothing
but an enraged correspondent). To an extent, the editor is willing,
even glad to accept the mantle laid upon his shoulders--but there are,
unfortunately, limits to his endurance. Those limits are reached, for
example, when he receives a bulky manuscript, accompanied by a note:
“Dear Sir: I am sending you herewith _Ruminations_, an epic of 4,700
lines, some considerable parts of which I hope you will publish in your
next issue. If not, will appreciate detailed criticism.”

Again, one’s patience is severely tested by a letter such as this:

Dear Mr. Editor: I am a subscriber and well-wisher. I have sent you
poems several times, but do not hold it against you that you have
returned them. Of course, poetry is only a sideline with me; my
business is fire and casualty insurance. I have just written a book
of 179 pages on my experiences in this line, and am mailing it to
you under separate cover. Would appreciate your going over it, and
correcting all the mistakes in grammar and style.

Ah, if these people would only realize that the editor is not only
engaged in running a magazine, but incidentally is trying to earn a
living!

Beyond all the above, there is the aspiring contributor who goes out of
his way to find ingenious means of attracting attention. An occasional
method is to send a poem (one such, received not long ago, was exactly
two lines long) in a huge envelope by special delivery; this usually
arrives just when the editor is in the middle of dinner, and does
succeed in drawing attention to itself--though not always the attention
that results in an acceptance. Again, there is the versifier who mails
a poem on each successive day for two or three weeks. One does, indeed,
note the fact that he exists, and even gets used to him in a way; one
rather misses him when at length the daily submissions cease. But alas
for the assiduous poet! he gets just the same attention as everybody
else, and if he stands out in any way, it is as just a sort of amiable
pest.

More common are the decorative means of attracting attention. One poet,
invariably a lady, will adorn her manuscript with graceful water colors
in pastel tints--all very pleasant to look at, but, unfortunately, not
in the least improving the quite hopeless verses. Another rhymester
will submit poems in lavender or purple ink on goldenrod-yellow paper;
still another will send poems typed in a glaring red, or typed all in
capitals, or oddly letter-spaced--all of which do, indeed, give the
poems a unique appearance, though the authors seem not to realize that
their chances of acceptance are not improved by anything that makes the
work harder to read.

But these are minor matters, which I can pass over with a smile. There
is, however, one type of letter that causes me to glare. It arrives
periodically, and is usually worded about as follows:

Dear Editor: Enclosed find three poems, entitled _Spring Flowers_,
_April Sunshine_, and _First Love_. Immediately upon acceptance of
any of them, my subscription will follow....

I need only say that the poems _Spring Flowers_, _April Sunshine_,
and _First Love_ do not long clutter up the editorial office. Though
I may be fiendishly eager for subscriptions, I am not quite so hungry
for them as the correspondent evidently supposes. No, though I may be
corrupt as old Boss Tweed himself, I am not to be tempted by bribes
of one dollar. The author, by his supposed shrewdness, has insured
an action I would not otherwise willingly take. Since I could not
accept the poems without the imputation of having done so for ulterior
motives, I have no choice but to return them without even a reading,
and usually with a printed rejection slip.

In one of the several variations of the above letter, the author
notifies me that he has just put out a book, and is sending it for
review; immediately upon the appearance of the article, he will join
the subscription list. He might be surprised to know that, after this
letter, his chances for a review would be as great if the book were
printed in Chinese.

Then there is the versifier--comparatively rare, it is true--who seems
to imagine that a subscription dollar automatically provides a ticket
of admission to the pages of the magazine. She (for I cannot recall any
men who committed this particular indiscretion) begins with a fulsome
letter of praise, telling how much the quarterly means to her, and how
she would not be without it--no, not for the world. Accompanying the
letter, is a dollar bill, and five or six poems. The dollar bill is
accepted by the subscription department; the poems, being unworthy of
acceptance, go back to the author, along with a polite note of thanks
and regret. And thus the tempest is unleashed. By return mail, another
letter arrives--one which, somehow, has lost the admiring tone of the
earlier epistle:

Sir: What do you mean by sending my poems back? In your last issue,
you published some poems that were not half as good as mine. Besides,
better magazines than yours are glad to get my work So from now on I
want nothing whatever to do with you. Return my dollar at once, and
cancel my subscription.

Since it is worth more than the price to have the writer off the list,
I do indeed return the dollar and cancel the subscription.

A less infrequent type of correspondent is the one who waits till
the year’s end before making his feelings known. Then he vents his
stored-up disappointment:

Dear Editor: I have just received a renewal notice. I am not
renewing, and this is why. During the past year, I sent you six
batches of manuscripts. They have all come back. That being the case,
I am saving my subscription dollars for magazines that will print my
work.

There is, of course, nothing for the editor to say in reply. But
he cannot help asking himself why writers seem invariably to blame
editors for the lacks in their own work; and he is inclined to wonder
how many readers would be claimed by magazines such as _Harpers_, the
_Atlantic_, and the _Saturday Review_ if they were expected to rely
upon the subscriptions of contributors.

The sad fact is that there actually are some poetry magazines that
publish only subscribers’ poems; I know of one that, some years
ago, promised to print one poem a year by every subscriber. Such
magazines, which cannot possibly maintain any standards whatever, have
apparently given certain verse-writers the idea that they should be
taken as models. And the results have not always been happy for other
periodicals, as will be seen not only from the examples given above,
but from a letter which reached me just today from a writer who, though
never published in _Wings_, began by lauding the magazine, and went on
to say:

When I get ahead of several subscriptions obliged by recent
acceptances, I will certainly add _Wings_ to my wanted ones.

The thing I particularly note here is the word “obliged.” I can safely
attest that no writer, whatever his complaints, has ever been able
justly to use that word in connection with _Wings_.

Along with the pricks and prods of those who would like to see the
editorial and subscription departments merged, there have been the
problems of submitted manuscripts in general. One of the first duties
of an editor, of course, is to say “No!”; after all, it is difficult
to find room for all the available good material. But “No!” is at all
times a painful syllable to utter; the editor knows what warmth, hope,
and even devotion have gone into many of the poems, and what a chilling
blow a rejection can be. And if this is normally true, there are times
when “No!” literally sticks on the lips. One of those times is when
manuscripts are submitted or a book is sent in for review by an old
acquaintance or friend, a writer whom one especially likes, or to whom
one feels a personal obligation. Nevertheless, “No!” must be said just
as firmly in these cases as in others--though the after-effects are
sometimes disheartening. Thus, I remember that some poems were once
submitted by another editor, toward whom I felt warmly disposed, and
who had, some years before, accepted some of my own work for a college
publication. But his own verses were not good--and so what could I do
but return them with a friendly note, meant to be disarming? I had
thought that an ex-editor, even though an editor only in a small way,
would understand, but perhaps he was moved by higher principles, beyond
my comprehension. In any event, I know that when, sometime later, I
had occasion to speak to him over the telephone, he suffered a sudden
attack of amnesia in regard to my name.

Another time when it hurts one to say “No!” is when an expectant
contributor has been submitting again and again, trying very, very hard
to produce acceptable material. “Why, _why_ do you not keep any of
my work?” he may ask, plaintively. But can the editor help it if the
writer has not mastered the problems of his craft? True, the editor
can and does give hints and suggestions--at least, when the work seems
promising. But there are many, very many cases in which hints or
suggestions would be of no avail.

This brings me to the problem of criticism in general. Many
contributors ask for it, and seem to look for it almost as a matter of
course, as in the case of a letter (sent in with insufficient postage)
in my current mail: “Enclosed please find copies of some poems. I do
not necessarily expect that you would consider publishing any of them,
but would appreciate criticism.” Unfortunately, if the editor heeded
all the requests, he would not have time to eat or sleep. Even in
the few cases in which he does attempt criticism, he proceeds at his
peril--that is, when he deals with inexperienced writers (the “arrived”
or professional author is invariably receptive to criticism). More than
one beginner, having asked me for comments, has flared into fury upon
receiving them, and has written in indignantly to put me in my place,
assuring me, in effect, that I could not distinguish a poem from a
potato. No wonder that editors become wary about criticizing!

Then there was the woman whose poem would have been acceptable except
for one grossly inept word, for which it was easy to suggest a suitable
substitute. Hence I wrote her, commending the poem, and returning it to
her with the promise to accept it if it were changed as recommended.
Back came the poem in an early mail, along with the author’s outraged
assertion that her poems were put down just as God dictated them, and
that to change a syllable would be sacrilegious. Of course, it is
impossible to argue with God. And so the poem made its second return
trip to the divinely inspired author. So far as I know, it has still
not been shared with the reading public.

I shall never forget, likewise, the young man who, in the early days
of _Wings_, made an impromptu and uninvited visit to my apartment,
accompanied by a sheaf of poems, which he asked me to glance over.
Being still greener than a cucumber, I took him at his word, and
literally did glance over the material; a glance, in most cases, was
all that was needed, since it is no more necessary to read all of a
bad poem in order to know it is bad than it is necessary to swallow
all of a bad apple in order to be sure it is not honey-sweet. But
perhaps my speed of reading displeased the young author, or perhaps
something in my expression was to blame (for I have never learned the
art of the poker-face, a desirable acquisition for editors). Whatever
the cause, he sprang to his feet, his cheeks flaming red; snatched the
manuscript from my hand; and stormed toward the door. “If that’s how
you read manuscripts, Mr. Coblentz--” was all he could sputter. Then,
inarticulate with rage, he went stamping out, and slammed the door
behind him. Since that day, I have made it a rule never, never to read
a manuscript in the author’s presence.

And while on the subject of criticism, let me tell about Mr. Cooley.
Who he was, I cannot say; I have never seen him, and do not even know
if I spell his name correctly; all that I can say is that, during the
fledgling days of _Wings_, he introduced himself to me by telephone as
a native of the Bronx, and proceeded to read one of his poems, on which
he solicited my comments. No one but a newcomer at editing, I am sure,
would have given the comments: nowadays I would ask the writer to send
the manuscript through the mails. However, I did yield to Mr. Cooley’s
request, and thenceforth, unhappily, whenever he committed a poem, he
would hastily telephone me. As his favorite time of composition was
late at night, the telephone usually rang just as I was in the process
of retiring; more than once, having no clairvoyant perception of who
was at the other end of the line, I rushed out of bed, and hastily
donned my dressing gown. But I was less elated than Cooley may have
supposed when I heard his hearty voice, “I’ve just written another, and
will read it to you!” Poor Cooley! I had then, as ever since, a great
amount of sympathy for the creative fervor. But there were times when,
yawning and hardly able to keep awake while he read some interminable
bit of blank verse, I devoutly wished that the telephone had never been
invented.

Another problem, affecting _Wings_ in its early days, was connected
with another magazine, an aviation monthly which went by the same
name. Whether it antedated my publication I do not know, but I have
an impression that it had existed before, had been discontinued, and
had been revived after the establishment of my own magazine. Though
neither periodical ever questioned the other’s right to use the name,
both were put to much inconvenience--I know this from the sets of poems
occasionally forwarded to me from the other _Wings_ (which did not
publish poetry), and from the long stories on flying experiences that
sometimes added to my own mail, along with articles on subjects such
as _The Problem of Air-Cooled Engines_ and _Projected Explorations of
the Upper Stratosphere_. Many years later, after the rival _Wings_ had
ceased to be, I still received an occasional letter inquiring in which
issue we had published a discussion of _High Octane Gasoline and Cargo
Planes_ or _Air Flight Records in the Southern Hemisphere_.

As if such problems did not add sufficiently to life’s spice and
variety, there was the recurrent dilemma of the racketeer. You would
suppose that, in a field like poetry, where idealism is supposed to
rule and the prospects for financial profit are slight, the racketeer
would be as unknown as the hired assassin. But such, I discovered, was
far from the case. In a page of short comments and news items entitled
_Wing Beats_, I like to give publicity to new enterprises of possible
advantage to poets; but it was always difficult to be sure whether or
not a given project would actually be beneficial. And in the callow
early years of the magazine, I had several unfortunate experiences.

One case was that of the publisher who announced a forthcoming
anthology, for which he was seeking contributions. He mentioned several
well-known poets who would be represented, and requested a brief
notice, which I was constrained to grant. What he had neglected to say,
however, was that while the well-known poets did indeed appear and of
course were not asked to pay, the rank and file of the contributors
were required to subscribe for half a dozen copies each, at four
dollars a copy.

A similar scheme, for which I was repeatedly asked to give space,
involved composers who set poems to music, as the basis for promised
public concerts that were never held; and collected fees of about ten
dollars for each selection. This, it must be said, was hardly more
reprehensible than the action of the publisher who, also inviting a
free notice, issued a _Who’s Who in American Poetry_; it turned out
that this “indispensable directory,” aside from listing a few of the
obvious leaders, acknowledged the importance only of bards who would
dole out four dollars and seventy-five cents each for a copy. I fear
that I smiled just a little wrily to discover that many devotees of the
Muse, who “just could not afford” one dollar to support a legitimate
enterprise, had apparently no hesitation about investing in rackets of
this type.

But for unblushing chicanery, the publishers of the alleged _Who’s Who_
were scarcely equal to a certain mid-Western authors’ review which
solicited an exchange advertisement. As it claimed a considerable
circulation and I knew of no good reason to distrust its statements, I
thought it to my advantage to accept the advertisement--which announced
that it would begin publishing poetry with its next issue, and would
pay a specified sum. So far, so good! not only _Wings_, but six or
eight other poetry magazines, ran the advertisement. And how deeply we
were all to regret our rashness! Before long, our mailbags began to
bear almost daily complaints; many readers had submitted manuscripts
to the authors’ review--and invariably with the same result. One poem
by each writer was accepted, but not by the magazine to which it had
been submitted. The poem enjoyed the still more inviting fate of being
kept for the _Thornwall Anthology_, a “beautiful volume” in preparation
“on a cooperative basis”--which is to say that each contributor must
cooperate to the extent of purchasing twelve dollars’ worth of copies.

I should add that the authors’ review, now long out of existence, never
did publish or pay for any poem whatever.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

A Challenge to Giants

There are magazines whose policies are as devious as a river; there
are others that, like the proverbial arrow, aim straight toward their
destination. Certainly, it is no exaggeration to say that I have tried
to keep _Wings_ in the latter category, particularly with regard to
the perennial controversy between traditional and “modernistic” verse.
In this controversy _Wings_ has played a part that some would call
conservative, or even ultra-conservative--which is a little strange, in
view of the fact that the editor is not in other things a conservative.
He has sometimes wondered, also, whether the true conservative is
not he who drifts with the crowd; whether, in a world where the vast
majority proclaims itself in favor of “modernism,” the independent who
stands out against “modernism” is not the actual radical.

I will not deny that in some ways the situation in contemporary poetry
is deeply confused. But in other regards, everything has impressed me
as pellucidly clear. First of all, it has always struck me that certain
elements are necessary in poetry, in this age as in all others. One
is the ingredient of music: “She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must
die,” has a musical sound, as much today as when Keats wrote it, and
therefore has at least one of the qualities of poetry; but “She dwells
with ash-cans--ash-cans by a brick wall,” has no more music than the
thumping of a garbage truck. In much the same way, poetry creates,
and always has created, a magic or suggestiveness which is not that
of prose; and in this respect also the line about beauty qualifies,
but that about the ash-can does not. And, finally, poetry--like all
writing--should be as clear as the subject-matter and the skill of the
writer make possible; which does not imply that the meaning must always
stand out like a steel engraving, but that it must be as lucid as the
theme and the author’s ability permit, and that murkiness must not be
sought for its own sake.

These are, in brief, the principles that I have espoused in editorials
and reviews in _Wings_ ever since its first issue. But these
principles, though they might seem simple and self-evident, run counter
to the accepted mandates of the age, which have tended to abandon
music, and to make poetry uninspiring as a cement mixer, and unclear as
a fog-bank. And what do I mean by the “accepted mandates” of the age? I
mean the mandates of the group in power--those who control the policies
of our leading literary and sophisticated magazines, those who sit in
authority in prize committees, those who act as poetry advisers for
some of our major publishers, those who compile anthologies, and write
articles and reviews for some of the more influential media. At no time
have I denied that many of these are honest, capable, and convinced
men; but it seems to me that not a few are bewildered, and ignorant of
poetry, its nature and its history; not a few are but following the
normal human tendency to embrace whatever happens to be fashionable,
and commit the error of mistaking fashion and right.

Yet the fact is that much that is in style nowadays, and much that is
generally called poetry, has none of the qualities by which poetry
in past ages was recognized. Which majority, therefore, shall one be
aligned with?--the great preponderance of all the poets and critics
who have lived before our own century, or the few who within the past
several decades have striven to undermine yesterday’s accumulated lore
and skills? For my own part, I consider one thing self-evident: if
“modernistic” critics and verse-writers are right in their dominant
attitudes, then all of our famous predecessors, from Chaucer to A.
E. Housman, were in error. But if all the latter were in error, that
fact must be demonstrated by more cogent arguments than have yet been
adduced.

Yet can it be that all the proponents of “modernism” are wrong?
Before attempting to answer this question, let us ask whether history
shows no other cases of mistaken majorities. What of the belief in
witchcraft several centuries ago, when savants and nobles and common
men alike, from King James I of England down to the most ignorant
serving maid, were convinced believers in the reality of black magic?
What of slavery, whose abolition, it was honestly believed by many a
good man in England, America, and elsewhere, would bring inevitable
ruin to the world? What of headhunting, ceremonial cannibalism, human
sacrifice, widow-burning, and other dread rites, all of which were
accepted by large masses and even fervently defended, in some cases in
comparatively civilized lands? I do not, of course, mean to compare
modernism in verse to any of these horrors; but I do wish to emphasize
that mass acceptance of any theory, belief, or principle does not prove
the validity of the doctrine.

And in the case of recent poetry, what do we find? That some, like
Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, came over to the new camp after
unskillful efforts to write in the older forms; that others, like
Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, revolted
against traditional verse without ever having shown that they could
write it; that others again, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,
formed an _entente cordiale_ of mutually expressed admiration; that
still others, always ready to embrace the new, endorsed the “advanced”
principles for the sake of showing themselves to be different and
emancipated; that certain others, like “e. e. cummings” with his
typical lines such as “goo-dmore-ning(en” and “sing thatthis is
which what yell itfulls o,” performed the antics of circus clowns,
and finding themselves taken seriously, performed still more bizarre
antics; that many opportunists, of the sort who exist at all times
and in every circle, joined the procession for the sake of personal
advantage; that more and more bystanders trailed along out of fear or
in order not to appear behind the times; and that the great majority,
deeming themselves incompetent to judge and not daring to deny the word
of authority, stood by in apparent acquiescence though actually in
profound bewilderment and even in secret disgust.

Such, in a word, is my own interpretation of the rise of “modernism”
in verse, and indeed in all the arts. And such has been the conviction
behind the editorial policy of _Wings_. From the first, I realized that
my stand was challenging giants. I realized that I might put myself
under a personal cloud. But in the long run, all that counted was the
truth, and the only truth I could defend was truth as it appeared
through my own eyes. My judgment, like that of any human, might be
blurred, distorted, or perverted; but such as it was, it was my own; it
was all I had to go by, and it would have been despicable and cowardly
to stand by and muffle the convictions burning within me. And what if
I were to be penalized for speaking? In what period of history, and in
what land, have men not been penalized for speaking? Not that I had any
taste for martyrdom; but that I was convinced that the game of poetry,
like every other game, was not worth playing except in one way. There
may be those who can complacently accept whatever they believe to be
the mood of the age, and adapt their style to that mood; but I must
unhappily confess that I am not one of those pliable souls, and that
I should hide my face in shame even were the high honor of a Pulitzer
Prize or a Nobel Prize to come to me for work that I knew to represent
a compromise with standards that were not my own, and a truckling to
mere vulgar acceptability.

On the road which I have followed, followed perhaps with a mulish
intractability but certainly without wide meanderings, there have been
both penalties and compensations. The penalties have been those of shut
doors--and of occasional abuse and misrepresentation. Once or twice
a small “modernistic” magazine has honored me with a long article in
which my purposes, principles, and methods were entirely misstated. And
more than once a larger magazine has lent its pages to the controversy;
in one case the writer even descended to language of the gutter in
counter-attack when logic evidently failed him. And in other cases,
as in Randall Jarrell’s widely circulated _Poetry and the Age_, my
statements are subjected to a deliberate or unconscious distortion
that make them look about as a man’s image would appear through a
convex mirror. I do not wish to harp upon this point, but let me give
an example. Mr. Jarrell, referring to the preface of my anthology _The
Music Makers_, reports that I say that any poem must be, among other
things, “easy to understand.” This could logically be taken to mean
that I think that every poem should be on the level of Mother Goose;
and if I meant anything like that, I would be even more of a fool than
nature has made me. But what I say is the following:

Poetry may have both a satisfying rhythm and a touch of magic and yet
not be completely satisfying if it be without a third factor, which
for want of a better term we may call clarity. This is not to say
that it need have the simplicity of a kindergarten exercise; complex
themes by their very nature require complexities of utterance, yet
since the purpose of all expression is communication, whether of a
thought, a mood or an emotion, the consummate writer in any field
will phrase his messages as clearly as is consistent with their
thorough presentation.

There are more ways than one of damaging a reputation; and not the
least effective is by misstating a writer’s position so as to make him
appear silly. I should add that Mr. Jarrell’s publisher, though a man
of the highest reputation in his profession, and though writing me that
“I certainly would not want any reputable person like yourself to feel
that a book published by us did him substantial injustice in any way,”
refused my request for changes in the offending passages in subsequent
editions of the book; nor did Mr. Jarrell at any time apologize or
offer to make even partial amends.

In quite another way, I was to have a glimpse into the sharp and
biassed discrimination that occurs in the supposedly high-minded
and idealistic realm of poetry. The incident was a minor one, of no
intrinsic importance; and would not be worth reporting except for its
implications. There was a certain man (let me call him “Jones”) who had
once briefly visited me at my home, and was editing a magazine of free
verse--to which, naturally, I did not seek admittance. But one day I
read that Jones had started a new magazine, to be devoted exclusively
to traditional poetry. Since this was in my field, I had no hesitation
about mailing him two or three poems, along with the usual stamped
return-envelope. Sometime later the poems came back, along with a note:
“Dear C.: I rather like your verses entitled _Compensation_ and would
have ordinarily accepted them; but in view of what is being said as to
the position you have taken in poetry, I am afraid I must send them
back.”

Whether or not my poem was published by this particular magazine
was, of course, a matter of no importance; I would not under normal
circumstances have given a second thought either to its acceptance
or its rejection. But Jones, by his naive words, had made immense
disclosures; had unwittingly bared things which a shrewder editor
would have hidden beneath a gloss of words. That any man could be
such a craven as to refuse a manuscript because of what someone else
was saying as to the position in poetry taken by the writer!--this to
me was a notion so new, so startling that I had to read the sentence
several times in order to make sure it was real. I doubt whether Jones
had any idea at all how bitterly offensive his comment was; I will
even give him credit for meaning the statement by way of a friendly
explanation. But his attitude of mind, I thought, was exactly that
which has been too familiar in the past, when men have been sent to the
dungeon or the stake because of what someone else has said about their
heretical views.

Then, for the first time, I fully realized that I too was guilty of
heresy--yes, guilty of heresy because I had tried to uphold poetic
standards against those who, I was firmly convinced, were the true
heretics. I have since had reason to suppose that other editors, and
more influential ones, have followed the same principles as Jones. But
I still have not learned just “what was being said” as to the position
I had taken in poetry. Against known and spoken charges I have never
felt any incapacity to defend myself. But against unknown and concealed
accusations I am helpless.

Sometimes I have wondered what is really desired by those critics and
editors who seem to feel that the devil himself has smoked his way
into any attitude of mind that happens to oppose their own. Perhaps
their ideal is that which Matthew Arnold expresses in two lines--not,
however, as an ideal, but in despair at the modern lack of faith:

Light half believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d.

These “light half believers,” surely, never find anyone who objects to
their position strongly enough to blacklist them.

But whatever the costs of uttering ones convictions, the rewards have
been considerable. These rewards have been all the richer for not being
of a concrete or material nature; they have come in friendships formed,
usually by correspondence only; and in letters that have drifted in
from men and women all over the country, and even from Canada and
England; many from unknown persons, but some from noteworthy poets.
Thus I learned that there was an undercurrent of support for my views,
a wide opposition and resentment against “modernistic” perversions,
and a simple longing for the poetry that sings, and that speaks to the
imagination and the heart. But most of the lovers of the older poetry,
I found, could not make themselves vocal; they had no organ for their
opinions, which they usually expressed by ceasing to buy or even to
read contemporary poetry. Hence _Wings_ filled for them a long-felt
need.

I wish that I had space to quote from some of the many letters of
commendation. Not, of course, that I took them all seriously; I soon
learned to recognize the honeyed words that besought a honeyed favor,
the sugary speech that accompanied submitted manuscripts or books
forwarded for review--experience was to teach me that the writers would
be as likely as not, at the next winking of an eye, to turn to the
opposite camp, if this seemed to suit their purposes. But the honest
approbation of persons who had no axe to grind, and who wrote from
remote places to tell how they had been helped or elated (and who often
accompanied their letters with tangible proof in the way of unsolicited
subscriptions) has been heart-warming, and has made it easier to keep
on at times when I was inclined to wonder why any man in his right mind
would run a poetry magazine.

Beyond this, I have been urged on by the knowledge that _Wings_ has
provided a medium of publication for poets in a world where media of
publication are fast fading out. Perhaps this will seem no great thing;
but without the springs that supply the streams, the streams will dry
up. True, the poets themselves frequently seem not to realize this, and
too often will not support the very magazines that encourage their own
efforts to fly; but this is not true of all, nor nearly all. And many
of them--though the editor knows that he will never look into their
eyes, nor shake their hands--have made themselves as dear to him and as
real as persons actually seen.

It is for this reason, more than for any other, that I have never
regretted the strange and devious unraveling of fate that has taken me
along the road of editorship. And it is for this reason that I would
not, even if I could, change one inch of the route I have traveled.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

A Recruit for Publishers’ Row

In those innocent early days when I blandly assumed the ownership,
editorship, and management of a poetry magazine, I did not foresee that
my new duties were to lead toward the great world of book publication,
even in its more limited phases. But he who winds along unknown roads
may expect to arrive at strange destinations.

Had it not been for my long poem, _The Pageant of Man_, I might never
have made the beginnings. This extensive work, finished in the early
fall of 1935, duly made its visits to several editorial offices--how
many, my records do not tell me; but the number, within a mere few
months, could not have been great. I do recall that one or two
publishers professed interest; but when the reports came in, I listened
to the old, old story: the editorial department approved, but the sales
department was less sanguine; it could see no sufficient market, hence
the manuscript was coming back to me with regrets, etc. Now I would not
for a moment imply that the sales departments, from their own point
of view, were not quite right; certainly, there were more promising
investments than a poem of Gargantuan length (one which eventually
would cover 319 well-filled octavo pages). Nevertheless, the verdict
was not gratifying to the author.

It may be that I was growing impatient; it may be that some publisher,
had I persisted, would have uttered the fervently desired “Yes!” But
it is a curious thing that a writer, having toiled at a book with
painstaking patience over a period of years, may all at once squirm
with impatience after the results of his labor have been confided to
paper. I had produced what was certainly (and not in bulk only, I
thought) my most considerable effort; and I wanted doors to open upon
it, I wanted it to breathe the fresh air and see the light. Therefore
it was exasperating to have the sales departments keep it in darkness.

My exasperation, however, was to be short-lived. In the winter of 1936,
an unexpected windfall came to me from a never-to-be-repeated source--a
mountainous sum, slightly more than a thousand dollars. And with money
comes temptation. Almost instantly, an insidious thought thrust itself
into my mind. Perhaps this would enable me to publish _The Pageant of
Man_ on my own account. I knew that authors far more celebrated than
myself had published their own work, occasionally with notable success;
the names of Upton Sinclair and others were in my mind. Even if the
saddest of sad luck were to pursue me, and I were to lose my thousand
dollars--at least, the book would be in print, and I would be no
worse off than before receiving the money. True, the craft of writing
should, ideally, remain distinct from the business of publishing;
authors should devote their time to writing, and publishers should be
specialists in book production and distribution. So I should have said,
even a short while before--but now, on the contrary, my attitude was:
why hold back?--never venture, never succeed!

At least, I would explore the possibilities. The first problem,
therefore, was to find a printer. Mr. Grossman, the printer of _Wings_,
with his small establishment, had not the facilities for a book such as
_The Pageant of Man_, and I knew no other reliable person. But there
are times when fate, with all the appearance of intelligent intention,
puts one into touch with just the needed person at precisely the
desired time. While I was wondering as to printers, a letter reached
me from a man I had never heard of before, Joseph A. Wennrich, who
represented an establishment known as The Guild Bookcrafters; he had
seen _Wings_, and wished to bid on printing it. As it happened, I was
quite pleased with The Artype Press, and needed no bid on printing
_Wings_; but Wennrich’s letter put a thought into my mind: the Guild
Bookcrafters, to judge from their name, might be able to print _The
Pageant of Man_. In any case, I would find out.

A telephone call brought immediate action. Mr. Wennrich, assuring
me that book printing was his specialty, arranged to visit me that
evening. I looked forward to the interview; but strangely, the
appointed hour came and went, and no visitor rang my bell. “Well, that
ends that,” I thought. “So this Wennrich is just another of those
unreliables, whom I’d better not get entangled with.”

But I had done him an injustice. Next morning he telephoned; explained
that, at the last minute, something unavoidable had prevented his
coming, and even made it impossible to notify me; and asked to be
excused, and permitted to visit me the coming evening. And he did visit
me as requested--and all through the years of our ensuing relationship
he proved to be not only highly capable, but dependable almost to the
point of punctiliousness.

He turned out to be a tall, nervous-mannered, explosively enthusiastic
man in his late thirties. His chief interest was less in printing for
its own sake than in book designing, and he soon convinced me that he
had taste, inventiveness, and originality, as well as abounding energy
and a thorough knowledge of his craft. From him I was to receive what
was in effect a private course in the making of books.

But for the present, the one question was _The Pageant_. That Wennrich
could print it, and print it well, was evident from the expert samples
of his work which he displayed--but what about the price? He would have
to take the manuscript with him, he said, and try to reach a figure.
Several days went by, during which I was half resigned to the belief
that he would quote an amount far beyond my reach. And then, on one
never-to-be-forgotten evening, he paid me another visit. And as I bent
above the paper scrawled with his jottings, my heart gave a leap. The
quotation, for an edition of a thousand copies, was less than I had
feared; it would indeed be possible to bring out the book, even leaving
a little over for advertising!

I will not go into the problems that confronted a novice like myself,
except to say that since the new publishing medium would need a name
and would inevitably be connected with _Wings_, I hit at once upon the
obvious designation, The Wings Press. By June of 1936, _The Pageant of
Man_ was in print, though publication had not been set until September;
in the interval, copies were to be sent to various persons of note
in the poetic world, in order to get their comments for possible use
on the jacket. And comments were forthcoming, more pleasingly than
anticipated; and the reviewers also, after the book’s appearance,
were more generous, far more so, than I had felt any reason to hope;
and even the sales were not bad--that is, not for a book of poetry,
and one issued without the means of distribution available to a large
publisher. I felt fortunate that a hundred copies had been sold before
publication day, and that copies continued to sell year after year,
though of course at a slower rate. And while this experience would not
lead me to recommend self-publication as a means of getting rich, never
for a moment did I regret my plunge.

Originally I had thought of this publication as a single,
never-to-be-repeated venture; I did not realize that it would set off
a chain reaction, which would involve me more deeply and ever more
deeply. After the appearance of the book, which had been advertised in
_Wings_ and elsewhere, I began receiving letters from subscribers and
contributors: “Dear Editor: I have a book of poems, and hope you will
consider publishing it for me. If so, what would your price be?”

Though this was more than I had contemplated, it did give me pause.
And then I put the question to myself: Why, indeed, not publish a book
every now and then, provided that it was of good quality, and something
I could feel gratified to sponsor? True, I could not afford to publish
at my own expense--but had the authors themselves not indicated that
they did not expect this?

Before I go any further, let me make matters plain as to what has
come to be variously known as “subsidy,” “cooperative,” and “vanity”
publishing. While some persons, without knowledge of the facts, might
accuse me of being in the position of the thief who proclaims, “All
those other robbers are bad--I’m the only honest one,” I think that any
discriminating judge will admit that there are two kinds of publishing
projects which rely upon authors’ subsidies. The first, which has
become notorious, is practiced by firms--usually large firms--that
advertise extensively in magazines and by brochures. These firms, a
number of which the Federal Trade Commission recently found guilty of
deliberate misrepresentation, have no standards whatever, and accept
virtually everything--at least, everything that is paid for, and can be
distributed without danger of interference by the postal authorities.
Publishing of this kind cannot be condemned too strongly; and I,
who have examined book after book of verse of almost unbelievable
ineptitude, have more reason than most for joining in the denunciation.

But there is another sort of subsidy publication of worthwhile
titles; and this has been undertaken at times by specialized houses,
by university presses, and even, if I have not been misinformed, by
general trade publishers. I will admit that, ideally, this should not
be; ideally, no writer should be required to do more than write; it is
repugnant, and surely not in the best interests of literature, that
only the solvent author should be published. Yet what is one to do when
the work is something which--like certain scholarly monographs or like
long poems or collections of verse--may have high merits but small
sales possibilities? What when the prospective publisher is financially
unable to shoulder the responsibility? Is such work to remain in
oblivion? Or is it better that it be issued, under discriminate and
ethical auspices, even at the author’s expense? I think that there can
be no two answers to these questions when it is remembered that it
was this form of publishing that gave to the world the early work of
Shelley, Browning, and many another author now renowned.

When we turn to contemporary poetry, we find some special problems.
Paradoxically, while the art no longer enjoys its old-time popularity
with the reading public, it has apparently lost little if any of its
vogue with writers. It may not be that, as is sometimes asserted,
“everybody” is trying to write poetry; nor need we suppose that, as has
also been alleged, there are “millions” of poets in America. But it
does seem unquestionable, based upon the packs of manuscripts submitted
to editors, that thousands of people are seriously setting out to write
poetry; and out of this multitude, a fair proportion are producing work
worthy of being read and remembered. Even if the number of readers had
kept pace with that of writers, the facilities of all the recognized
trade publishers would be taxed to bring out the deserving books; but
under present conditions, when publishers either shun poetry as if it
were a bad debt, or issue it as if it were a bad habit (rarely more
than two or three books a year, and these often by writers already on
their lists), there is inevitably a large and worthy surplus that could
not conceivably find a home with any of the big royalty-paying houses.
What, then, shall the authors do with their intensely imagined, their
passionately conceived works, which in many cases represent the most
delicate and the most fervent and perfect flowering of their lives?

The authors themselves have answered this question; they have answered
it by their readiness to seek subsidy publishers. It is at this point
that the small publisher, who acts with an eye to poetic quality and
to writers’ needs, may perform a real service. In a negative way, he
may accomplish something by the very act of saving some of the poets
from the pirates. And in a positive way, he may aid by insuring the
author the joy and stimulation that can come only from seeing his
work in print; he may obtain for him a certain attention, even if not
celebrity; he may give him a memorial to hand down in pride to his
children and grandchildren. And he may--who knows?--rescue some capable
poet, even some outstanding poet from otherwise inevitable oblivion.

It may be worth adding that, apart even from the views of the authors
themselves, I am far from alone in this opinion. Consider the following
from an article by Aron M. Mathieu (_Writer’s Digest_, July, 1957):

One obvious category of writing that seldom finds a publisher, even
though it may be outstanding, is poetry. A poet, therefore, can
have much pleasure and gratification from a self-published book,
well-bound, often beautifully designed, and through which he will
reach at least a limited audience. There is always for him the hope,
too, that having reached print, posterity might wake to him.

There are, of course, possibilities of abuse in all subsidy publishing;
and for this reason, there were certain principles which, from the
beginning, The Wings Press felt bound to establish. It picked its
books, first of all, on the basis of merit already mentioned, that the
book must deserve publication for its own sake; rejections have greatly
outnumbered acceptances, as many writers throughout the country will
testify. It has never solicited any author for manuscripts; nor has it
ever advertised (except in a limited way, for one brief period years
ago, when Wennrich and I acted in virtual partnership, and announced
in _Wings_ that we would consider book manuscripts of verse). Not
less important! I have felt it necessary to dispel all illusions in
the poet’s mind; I have always stated frankly that fame is not to be
expected, that financial gain is unlikely, and financial loss the
normal thing; and I have left it for the writer to decide whether
the non-commercial advantages would offset the commercial losses. I
have not concealed the fact that bookstores, except sometimes in the
author’s home town, will not stock books by unknown versifiers, and
that, unless the poet has been widely published, he cannot expect
much of an audience outside the circle of his personal connections.
But while mentioning all this, I am not unaware that even the large
publishers could do little by way of sales, since not even they can
create a market where there is no reading interest. I remember cases
such as that of a certain skilled poet, whose work had been widely
published and who had just won a $5000 prize (the largest offered in
the world of poetry); despite the publicity attendant upon the award,
and despite the audiences presumably developed by her previous books,
her _Collected Poems_ was issued by a leading publisher in an edition
of only 750 copies, of which a considerable number were distributed
_gratis_ to the press--and this, incidentally, must not be taken to
mean that all the remaining copies were sold.

With such comparisons in mind, I do not think that The Wings Press
has done very badly by its authors. I know, in fact, that a great
majority, after publication, have professed themselves highly and
even enthusiastically pleased. And the complaints--for there have
been complaints, a very few--have mostly concerned minor matters. One
author, quite a few years ago, was understandably irked when a careless
binder smeared glue over the covers of many books (we overcame the
trouble by having the books rebound). Another author was justifiably
annoyed when a printer, disregarding a correction made in the proofs,
endowed her name on the book’s front cover with an extra letter. And
still another, whose book had in my opinion been beautifully made,
voiced two objections, the first of which she excitedly rushed to me
by long-distance telephone: the title of the book (which consisted
of four short words) had not been gold-stamped in three lines on the
face of the cover, as she would have liked, but consisted of one line
only! The other complaint, which occurred to her sometime later, was
entrusted to a letter: the jacket blurb had said that her poems were
“unpretentious.” This, after consultation with some friends, she took
as an insult, though the fact was that the poems _were_ simple and
unaffected, and had the merit of making no pretensions.

With most of the authors, however, my relations have been pleasant,
even cordial; the publications of The Wings Press have earned me many
friends-by-correspondence. However, on two occasions they have brought
me sharp grief, when the respective authors--Grace Nixon Stecher
and Garth Bentley, both of them able poets, and the latter a man of
exceptional promise--died suddenly before publication of their books.
The case of Bentley shocked me particularly: he fell dead of a heart
attack just two days before the first copies of his _Behold the City_
reached his office in Chicago.

After printing one or two Wings Press books, Joseph Wennrich made
a proposal: he would cooperate with me in bringing out certain
subsequent books, he to provide the printing, I to pay for materials
and incidentals, and any returns to be divided on a stated basis. This
proposal, as I look back on it, could hardly have been more impractical
had he himself been a poet; however, though he and I were to reap
nothing financially, we did have the satisfaction of much enthusiastic
conferring and planning. The first book to see the light under the new
agreement was _Flame Against the Wind_, by Florence Wilson Roper, the
Virginia writer whose work had first attracted me several years before
in the verse magazine _Kaleidograph_: in this case, the author had
to make no payment. Subsequently, Wennrich printed one or two other
books under the same arrangement, though neither of us, in view of
the limited sales, would have been able to endure the wear and tear
indefinitely. And then, in 1941, my association with Wennrich was
interrupted as an aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Though in his forties,
he was subject to conscription, for he was then unmarried; and being
drafted, he gave up his business, disposed of his equipment, and never
did return to book printing. After his discharge from the army, he
obtained work as the foreman of a printing plant in Middletown, New
York; but this plant did not produce books, hence we could not resume
our old relationship--a casualty of the war which I, for one, have
always regretted.

Today I feel that there is greater need than ever for publication
of the kind undertaken by The Wings Press and by the presses of
several other poetry magazines, whose editors are actuated less by
the desire to grow rich than by the wish to help poets. Though some
of the university presses have sponsored books of current verse, and
though here and there a prize committee has come to the rescue by
providing book publication, and though one or two publishers have
been experimenting with paper-backed editions of contemporary work,
the position of poets as a whole is darker than ever--particularly
those poets who honor the traditions of the ages. I think it not too
much to say that if Gray or Keats, Byron or Shelley were to come back
under other names, their work would be unceremoniously refused in
the present book market, perhaps without even a reading: not because
the work was not good (though few can recognize good poetry unless
it is neatly tagged and labelled), but because it lacked appeal to
the sales department. Under these conditions, Gray or Keats, Byron or
Shelley would remain in obscurity unless someone provided the financial
wherewithal. True, they might remain in obscurity even after such
publication; but the world of print is a miraculous world, and there is
always a chance that what has passed through its gateways will be seen
and heard, if not today, then possibly tomorrow. And if even one Gray
or Keats, Byron or Shelley is preserved (though incidentally a thousand
books sail down the waters to oblivion), then surely a service has been
performed which has more than justified all the agonies of publication.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

A Place to End

Since this story is one to which no one can write “Finis!” so long
as I live, it will be as logical to end at one place as at another.
And having already written about as much as I have any interest in
reporting, I will bow my exit after trying to shed light on a few
concluding matters.

Of the various books pertaining to poetry which I have put forth since
the appearance of _The Pageant Man_ in 1936, I shall mention only
one, not for its own sake, but for what it tells of other poets. In
the twenty years following publication of _Modern American Lyrics_, I
had observed a considerable amount of excellent new American poetry,
much of it by recognized poets, and much by little-known or unknown
writers. But whether it proceeded from established versifiers or from
the unestablished, it was insufficiently read; indeed, a large part of
it was not available at all except to the limited audiences of “little
magazines” and of minor presses. It seemed to me that this work, or
at least a representative portion of it, should be made accessible
to a wider public; and therefore, despite the horrors of obtaining
permissions and the mountains of clerical labor, I conceived the idea
of compiling an anthology--provided, of course, that a publisher could
be found to back it.

Such a publisher, fortunately, did present himself--and presented
himself on the first attempt, so far as I can recall, in the person of
Mr. Thomas Yoseloff, head of the New York firm of Bernard Ackerman,
Inc. (and, incidentally, Director of the University of Pennsylvania
Press). I had never met Mr. Yoseloff (though years later I was to
have that pleasure during a brief visit to New York), and I had no
introduction to him except through my letter; but he was interested
in the idea I suggested, and contracts were soon drawn up for the
appearance of the book under the title of _The Music Makers_--the first
of a series of volumes, both in poetry and prose, for whose publication
I am indebted to this gracious and able man.

In the introduction to _The Music Makers_, I point out that “the number
of published volumes of capable poems was not great compared with the
amount of such poetry written,” and “that many even of our better
known poets did not enjoy a public matching their merits.” Looking
back upon my remarks after the passage of years, and seeing how many
poems of real beauty written by Americans twenty or thirty years ago
have been overshadowed or forgotten, I feel more strongly than ever the
justification for these further statements:

Every reader of current verse will recognize, for example, the names
of Arthur Davison Ficke, Robert Nathan, Cale Young Rice, David
Morton, Witter Bynner, John Hall Wheelock and Jessie B. Rittenhouse;
but how many have stopped to consider that these authors may have
written poems deserving to be read and remembered a hundred years
from now? How many have wondered if William Ellery Leonard’s _Two
Lives_, issued a score of years ago, may not be among the immortal
long poems of the language? How many have asked themselves if, in the
whole history of American literature, any sonneteer has written more
nobly or any lyricist more tenderly than George Sterling, who died in
1926? At best, little more than a half recognition crowns many who
are regarded as among the most soundly established of recent American
poets; a half recognition of occasional praise and publication, but
of small audiences.

Unfortunately, an anthology such as _The Music Makers_, even if
it could do something for these poets, could do much less than
they deserved. And the reason, as I saw it, was twofold: first, a
materialism in the very age, which turned men’s thoughts outward rather
than inward, and diverted them from poetry to prose; and secondly, the
obscuring and confusing tendencies within literature itself, so that
opaque and rhythmless work could be exalted as poetry thanks to the
very fact that it was opaque and rhythmless, while an offering could be
defended as poetic on the ground, for example, that it gave a perfect
imitation of a drunkard at a bar (as in a critical note in one of our
widely circulated literary media). Faced with such a degeneration of
standards, how could one expect that the honorable singers of the
ancient high profession would continue to be respected?

In connection with _The Music Makers_, a curious incident occurred--one
showing how far afield and in what unforeseen directions a book of
verse may spread its seeds. I quote from the _New York Times_ of
November 25, 1952:

HONG KONG, Nov. 24. After spending almost two years in a Chinese
Communist jail, the Rev. Francis Olin Stockwell, a Methodist
missionary from Oklahoma, left Hong Kong for the United States with a
Bible and a book of poetry, to which he attaches special value.

While he was imprisoned in China, the 52-year-old Mr. Stockwell wrote
a 50,000-word manuscript on his prison experiences between the lines
of the poetry book--“The Music Makers,” by Stanton A. Coblentz.

When I read these lines--which were sent to me by several
correspondents--I knew that even if _The Music Makers_ had failed in
all other respects, it would not have been compiled in vain. However,
had Mr. Yoseloff not provided the book with a generous format including
exceptionally wide margins, it might not have served quite so well!

Because of the degeneration of standards which I mention above, and
which _The Music Makers_ aimed to combat at least in part, a group of
staunch traditionalists, in the mid-forties, formed an organization
known as The League for Sanity in Poetry. I have always thought
the name a poor one; one cannot, of course, obtain sanity by means
of a league or any other form of organization; a more appropriate
designation would have been, The League for Standards in Poetry. I
remember an earnest letter from Albert Ralph Korn, of New York (of
whom more later), pointing out that the principles of the poetic world
were degenerating as never before, and urging me to take the lead in a
counter-movement. At about the same time, a letter to a similar effect
arrived from Lilith Lorraine, the editor of a Texan verse magazine,
_The Raven_, and later to be editor of _Different_; she was then one
of the most convinced advocates of traditional poetry, a devoted and
energetic worker. I cannot say which of us originally conceived the
idea of the League; but certain it is that it was conceived, and was
established, with a committee consisting of Albert Ralph Korn, Lilith
Lorraine, Etta Josephean Murfey, and Lawrence Neff (the latter two,
former editors of poetry magazines) in addition to myself. (Mr. Korn
subsequently withdrew owing to a disagreement with one of the other
members, and his place was taken by Juliet Brooke Ballard). The League
began by putting forth a pamphlet, _The Need for Sanity in Poetry_,
and for a time it issued regular bulletins, under the title of
_Pinnacle_, which expressed itself as “For the Preservation of Poetry
at Its Topmost Pinnacle,” and printed these words of Shelley beneath
its masthead: “Poetry ... makes immortal all that is best and most
beautiful in the world.”

As an example of the sort of thing we opposed, we quoted the following,
from the beginning of a “poem” by the well-known “modernist” E. E.
Cummings, which the equally well-known anthologist Oscar Williams had
valued highly enough to include in his compilation, _New Poems, 1943_:

ygUGuh

ydoan
unnuhstan
ydoan o
yunnunstan dem
ygudug ged

unnunstam dem doidee
gyudug ged ruduh
dyoan o nudn

LISH bud LISN

I believe that the average reader will agree that when gutter trash
such as this is palmed off as poetry, and--worse still!--seriously
commended and anthologized, it is time that something be done, if not
by a league for sanity, at least by a disinfecting squad.

The League was not, as some of its opponents liked to imply, an
organization of bearded antediluvians established for the specific
purpose of choking freedom and bringing back the good old days of
Queen Victoria. It did, however, favor law as opposed to anarchy. Its
principles as to experimentation are summarized in two of the ten items
of belief listed in the second issue of _Pinnacle_:

While experimental forms of verse can and sometimes do serve their
purposes adequately, it must be borne in mind that experimentalism is
never permissible as a mere mask to hide ignorance of time-honored
and achievement-honored patterns.

Intelligent experimentation by competent craftsmen should be
encouraged, but it is insane to advocate junking the forms made
famous by the greatest masters of the ages. Experimentation can be
justified only for the purpose of adding to, not destroying, the
forms whose value has been proved by time and usage.

If this is conservatism, it is sober, moderate, and forward-looking
conservatism, of the sort that only the absolute iconoclast--which too
often means the absolute wrecker--can rationally oppose.

Letters, showering into the League offices from all parts of the
country, showed a widespread sympathy with our objectives. A typical
communication was one received from Chicago, from the managing editor
of the national magazine of a large fraternal organization:

From the nauseous messes which constantly appear in newspapers and
magazines on the pretense that they are poetry, I have been forced to
the conclusion that many editors do not know poetry from doggerel.

If your League is prepared to do something about it, if only to
call public attention to the situation, and ridicule the pretenders
who call themselves poets, and the ignorant editors who print their
outgivings, I am for you.

Though obliged to reject suggestions that I serve as its National
President, I did give considerable time to the League over a period
of years, and wrote quite a few--though far from all--of the longer
articles in _Pinnacle_. Other contributors included Robert Avrett,
a Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Tennessee,
and later, for a time, acting editor of _The Lyric_; Cullen Jones,
Ruth Crary Clough, Anna T. Harding, Donald Parson, and other writers
of excellent verse. A number of regional directors were appointed
throughout the country, and for several years a real organization
existed. But that organization, as happens in many cases, did in
time break down, less because of waning enthusiasm than for lack of
the considerable funds necessary to print and distribute _Pinnacle_
and other releases, and to carry on the various campaigns; many
small contributions continued to come in, but they were inadequate
to meet expenses on the original scale. Eventually, therefore,
_Pinnacle_ was embodied as a department in Lilith Lorraine’s magazine,
_Different_--and with the ultimate discontinuance of _Different_, this
whole phase of our activities came to an end. Yet I am sure that all
persons associated with the League felt that, during its several years
of life, the organization did do something to combat the tides of
chaos. And if it did not do enough--after all, what other force _has_
done enough?

* * * * *

As these pages draw toward their end, I think it fitting to pay tribute
to the many fine men and women whom I have known personally or by
correspondence, and who have worked in various ways in the interests of
poets and of poetry. Some of these have served the League for Sanity
in Poetry, some have lent the aid of their advice, their suggestions,
their contributions, and their encouragement in my sometimes arduous
duties on _Wings_; some have edited other poetry journals or poetry
columns, or served as poetry editors for newspapers or magazines, or
written books or compiled anthologies, or conducted poetry programs
over the radio, or sponsored prize contests, or merely stood by in the
much-needed capacity of lovers and readers of poetry. These persons
have been far too numerous to mention by name; indeed, for fear of
discriminating unconsciously, I should not care to cite most of them
by name. I shall, therefore, refer personally only to a few who are no
longer living.

The first who occurs to me is the celebrated Irish author, Lord
Dunsany, whose poems, stories, and plays I have enjoyed for many years.
My first contact with him occurred some years ago, when I sent him
a copy of _The Pageant of Man_. This gift he might have received in
silence, or with a polite and meaningless note of thanks, while filing
the book away in the great library of the unread. On the contrary,
however, he did read my lengthy poem, and wrote me in enthusiastic
terms. The correspondence between us continued, and subsequently he
did me the favor of contributing a preface to my series of rhymed
narratives, _Time’s Travelers_.

Meanwhile he was waging a valiant fight against the inanities and the
insanities of “modernism” in verse. And this fight he took to America,
during several lecture tours that brought him before large audiences on
both coasts. His point of view is reported by an interviewer for the
California magazine _Fortnight_ for April 13, 1953:

These people who write so-called modern verse don’t have anything
approaching the rhythm of moderate prose; they have no meter, no
rhyme and not always decency that would be permitted in any drawing
room....

The Irish writer is angry with people who instead of saying “I don’t
make head or tail of it” which according to his lordship would be the
truth, say: “I see it’s very clever but I’m not quite clever enough
to see all of it.”

“Take a dirty roll of paper,” Lord Dunsany said, “roll it up, hand
it over the counter and ask for a hundred dollars. The paper ‘might’
be a $100-bill, but the cashier won’t give anything for it. Why then
should a dirty meaningless line be accepted as thought which is more
valuable than money?... If writers of so-called modern verse are
sincere, they’re insane.”

From the above, the reader will judge that I was heartily glad to cry
“Amen!” to all that Lord Dunsany said. I was, in fact, delighted that
so wise and witty a fighter in the cause of poetry had come to America;
and I was naturally eager to meet this man whom I had known for so many
years through his work, and more recently, by correspondence.

To my joy, a meeting was arranged for one memorable evening at the Alta
Mira Hotel in Sausalito, where Flora and I had dinner with Dunsany
along with his hostess Mrs. Hazel Littlefield Smith and her secretary,
who, despite his distaste for long motor trips, had driven him up from
the South. In the old-world atmosphere of this hotel, overlooking the
wide glittering waters of San Francisco Bay, we chatted for several
hours. I shall never forget my first glimpse of the man whom I had come
to consider my friend, as well as a friend of poetry: the dominating
tall figure, with the frame still lithe and active despite his
seventy-four years, and the impression he gave as if some redoubtable
old warrior chief had stalked upon the scene; the Shavian face, with
the keen and resolute features, the hair gray with traces of reddish
brown, the mustache and the pointed small beard, and the live twinkling
greenish eyes that shone with the vivacity of his energetic personality.

But perhaps even the word “energetic” does not fully express the verve
and vigor, the scintillating and bubbling enthusiasm of his speech and
manner. He seemed ageless to me as his words rushed on with a vivid
flow in sparkling tales or in more sober discussion. I thought, as I
heard him, that it was unfortunate that he had been born a “Lord”;
for the title, extraneous and artificial as it is, may have tended to
divert people’s minds from the rare and genuine qualities of the man
himself and from the accomplishment of his prose and poetry. Of the
things he said, one remark stands out particularly in my mind; he was
speaking of the discovery of unknown genius, and paused to say, “Would
it not be a dreadful thing if there were one among us, a Milton or a
Keats, and he should pass unknown?” I have often thought the same thing.

But let me pass on to other persons. I think that I should call
at least brief attention to two or three, who likewise should be
remembered for their devotion to poetry and their services to poets.

One of these was Alice Hunt Bartlett, for years American Editor of
the _Poetry Review_ of London, a supporter of that excellent journal,
compiler of several anthologies, and author of a bimonthly column,
_The Dynamics of American Poetry_. I remember her clearly as she
received me on several occasions in the drawing room of her Park Avenue
apartment--a gracious, distinguished lady, her hair streaked with gray,
her eyes bright and animated as she discussed her favorite subject.

Like Mrs. Bartlett, in her appreciation of poetry and her efforts
to encourage it, was another lady, whom, however, I knew only by
correspondence: Virginia Kent Cummins, also of New York, who at an
advanced age established the Lyric Foundation for Traditional Poetry,
which took over and supported one of the best of our verse magazines,
_The Lyric_, and made an annual award of one thousand dollars to a
chosen poet: a provision in her will has made it possible for _The
Lyric_ not only to continue as an organ of traditional poetry, but to
offer substantial prizes to contributors.

Finally, let me refer again to Albert Ralph Korn. Although, as in
the case of Mrs. Cumming we never met, he and I did have a long
correspondence; and I know that, during the ten or twelve years of
our contact, he was making constant benefactions for poetic causes;
offered innumerable prizes through magazines and organizations both
here and in England; wrote articles, put forth pamphlets, and sponsored
campaigns in favor of what he aptly called “clarity in poetry.” It was
he who suggested the departments, _This Is Poetry_ and _This Is Not
Poetry_, which for several years attracted attention in Wings; it was
he who voluntarily, at his own expense, distributed more than twelve
hundred copies of the pamphlet, _Poetry Today, Fire or Fog?_ containing
reprints of the first two years of _This Is Poetry_ and _This Is Not
Poetry_. Unlike many poets--for in his modest way he did write verse,
though he never obtruded his work upon others--he was less concerned
with the fate of his own offerings than with the welfare of poetry in
general; and it was for this reason, more than any other, that his
death in 1956 caused widespread regret.

It may be that, amid the great panorama of coming events and the
multitudes of humanity, benefactors such as Mr. Korn, Mrs. Bartlett,
and Mrs. Cummins will be obscured or forgotten. But to them, as to many
another, we can apply Vachel Lindsay’s words on John Peter Altgeld:

To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,
To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.

Whatever the flares of personal publicity along our paths, this in the
long run must be the consolation of those of us who dream and suffer,
toil and sing and interpret and aspire, beat at blank walls and float
among splendid vistas, and conceive visions of doom and of magnificence
in the glorious, unworldly, or otherworldly kingdom of poetry.

THE END

Transcriber’s Note

Missing punctuation has been silently added.

The following alterations have been made:

In chapter one: hundred _to_ hundreds
In chapter eleven: three _to_ these
In chapter fourteen: expansive _to_ expensive
In chapter fifteen: martydom _to_ martyrdom

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