Nothing new about this year, really — nothing new about the poets under consideration, unless you don’t know them. What’s new in Orem, on the other hand, is also old: car washes. It used to be there was only one car wash with a pull-you-thru tunnel: SuperSonic Car Wash. Last spring, construction started up in an empty lot in front of Costco on 800 South; Valerie and I speculated on what it could possibly be — a bank branch, a McDonalds, a drug store. So we were suitably surprised when the sign went up: Quick Quack Car Wash. Just about the same time, construction began on the empty lot on Center Street opposite the post office. It was, proudly announced some big signs, a Wiggy Wash, “North America’s Largest Car Wash,” come to rescue Oremites from sedate, nay stolid, car washes.
SuperSonic. Quick Quack. Wiggy Wash. No, alliteration is not making a comeback— it never left. But it’s been cheapened by this kind of usage. And yet, people respond, as they always do, to beauty, to poetry — with hunger. We recognize this response, but often make the mistake of considering it the poet’s intent. Amy Lowell had something to say about that, and it is good to be reminded, occasionally, of what she said:
No one expects a man to make a chair without first learning how, but there is a popular impression that the poet is born, not made, and that his verses burst from his overflowing heart of themselves. As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker.
His heart may overflow with high thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if he cannot convey them to his reader by means of written word he has no claim to be considered a poet. A workman may be pardoned, therefore, for spending a few moments to explain and describe the technique of his trade. A work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.
In the first place, I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty, even if sometimes the beauty of a gothic grotesque. We do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it necessary to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous, but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral all over a work of art, picture, statue, or poem is not only ridiculous, but timid and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with our impertinent suggestions. How far are we from “admitting the Universe”! The Universe, which flings down its continents and seas, and leaves them without comment. Art is as much a function of the Universe as an Equinoctial gale, or the Law of Gravitation; and we insist upon considering it merely a little scroll-work, or [sic] no great importance unless it be studded with nails from which pretty and uplifting sentiments may be hung![i]
Note that Lowell does not dismiss moral lessons, just asserts that poetry “should exist simply because it is a created beauty.” I agree with this statement, and it summarizes rather well the credo of the imagist. I also know how hard it is to write a poem without slipping in a moral sentiment. That is the nature of the medium — words.
But Lowell — who was born a month and a half before Robert Frost, in 1874, and died of a stroke on 12 May 1925[ii] — did try. Here is one of Lowell’s poems, picked almost at random:
*****Opal
You are ice and fire,
The touch of you burns my hands like snow.
You are cold and flame.
You are the crimson of amaryllis,
The silver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you,
My heart is a frozen pond
Gleaming with agitated torches.[iii]
The imagery, harnessed in the service of romantic love, is far more striking than the kind of romance it portrays; and far more durable. Note that although the poem begins with images of the sensation of touch and skin, it turns to colors of flowers — visual imagery. And it concludes with a stunning visual image which we are free to interpret how we will. To me, it speaks of the desolation of unrequited love.
Note also the absence of rhyme, and of a regular rhythm. These are also characteristic of imagist poems — in fact, of many, if not most, current poems — but not all of them. Consider this poem, which starts out unromantically, and manages to hold that pose for a line:
*****I Am Not Yours
I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.
Oh plunge me deep in love — put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.[iv]
The poet is Sara Teasdale — who was born August 8, 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, four years before T. S. Eliot, and died on 29 January 1933, a suicide at 49[v] — and though the text is formal and rhymed, the form is secondary to the emotion she is describing. Where Lowell is guarded and despairing, Teasdale is guarded and despairing — it’s a hazard of the job. “Teasdale’s work had always been characterized by its simplicity and clarity, her use of classical forms, and her passionate and romantic subject matter” as the biographical note on the Academy of American Poets website describes her.[vi] In the former, she resembles Robert Frost, though not in the latter. But notice that the emotion in her poem is expressed almost exclusively in images, not in any kind of abstraction or moral tag — a passionate desire to lose herself “as a light is lost in light”.
But perhaps Hilda Doolittle, who always published as H. D. — born 10 September 1886, died 27 September 1961 at 75 — was the one of this trio who most thoroughly embraced imagism, and in doing so seems to have turned away from the romance of self-absorption to a classicist’s cool and distant precision. Take a look at this poem — no, wait, read it aloud:
Hermes of the Ways
*****I
The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it
Are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves
Break over it.
But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.
Dubious,
Facing three ways,
Welcoming wayfarers,
He whom the sea-orchard
Shelters from the west,
From the east
Weathers sea-wind;
Fronts the great dunes.
Wind rushes
Over the dunes,
And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
Answers.
Heu,
It whips round my ankles!
*****II
Small is
This white stream,
Flowing below ground
From the poplar-shaded hill,
But the water is sweet.
Apples on the small trees
Are hard,
Too small,
Too late ripened
By a desperate sun
That struggles through sea-mist.
The boughs of the trees
Are twisted
By many bafflings;
Twisted are
The small-leafed boughs.
But the shadow of them
Is not the shadow of the mast head
Nor of the torn sails.
Hermes, Hermes,
The great sea foamed,
Gnashed its teeth about me;
But you have waited,
Where sea-grass tangles with
Shore-grass.[vii]
There is almost none of the self-centered romance of the earlier two poems here. What we have is a clear-eyed focus on a scene that barely gets described. The poem is firmly rooted in the mythology of Greece, and I find it difficult to understand without understanding that mythology. I leave it to you, however, to learn what you can about this god of borders, boundaries and thieves, and whom he waits for. H. D. “travelled to Europe in 1911, intending to spend only a summer, but remained abroad for the rest of her life”[viii] — and died in Zurich, Switzerland. One assessment of her, from that same biographical note on the website of the Academy of American Poets, by Alicia Ostriker, reads: “H.D. by the end of her career became not only the most gifted woman poet of our century, but one of the most original poets—the more I read her the more I think this—in our language.”
That’s a large claim, considering that Whitman and Dickinson and Pound and Eliot and Lowell are all in the running as originalists — and that’s only the Americans. But a lot of the poetry of my contemporaries tracks more closely with the characteristics of “Hermes of the Ways” — with its finely-honed words, its lack of overt meter, its reliance on the unspoken — than any of the other poets I’ve considered thus far in these postings, including Robinson Jeffers, who courted and tried to formalize Whitman’s long line. I wonder how much influence on the poets publishing in 2017 we can attribute to H. D.?
All of these poets knew each other, or their work, and could not help but bump up against one another. One minor but interesting such intersection is that of Amy Lowell and Robert Frost. Frost, returning to America, ‘Meets with Holt editor Alfred Harcourt and editors of the The New Republic, which had recently published “The Death of the Hired Man” and a favorable review of North of Boston by Amy Lowell.’[ix]
Lowell and Frost were almost exact contemporaries; Frost outlived Lowell by 38 years, and Teasdale by 30 years, and H. D. by a year and a third. It makes me wonder whether the vocation of poetry is harder on women than on men.
But hold on, I hear you say: Isn’t that an awfully small sample to draw such a wonderment from?
Your turn.
____________________
[i] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poets-trade, accessed 28 January 2017
[ii] Selected poems / Amy Lowell ; Honor Moore, editor. — S.l. : Library of America, c2004. — (American poets project ; 12). Biographical note, 143-144.
[iii] Ibid., p. 61.
[iv] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-am-not-yours, accessed 27 October 2016; the poem was first published in 1917.
[v] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sara-teasdale, accessed 30 January 2017.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/hermes-ways, accessed 30 January 2017.
[viii] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/h-d, accessed 30 January 2017.
[ix] Collected poems, prose, & plays / Robert Frost. – New York : Library of America, c1995; p. 940, Chronology, 1915.
Thanks to whomever uncovered that picture of Amy Lowell. In my next post I intend to discuss her wrangling with Ezra Pound over imagism, and that image is welcome here because of the reception accorded her in England when she went to investigate this new movement in poetry.
It makes a huge difference to me how influential Pound was with Lowell, and how influential she was in turn with other American women practicing poetry!
Lots to chew on, and chew over, here.
I love the line, “A work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.” Take that, all you who say that critical examination of a work of literature destroys the enjoyment of it!
I keep going back and forth on the idea that poetry should exist only because it is a created beauty. Her claim that “we do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons” stands in contrast with those of a more religious bent (including many Mormon leaders) who claim that the world itself is a sermon. But is the world the lesson, or the schoolhouse? Or even even the lone and dreary wilderness where we must find or forge our own meaning, rejecting or accepting preachers false and true? All three have at least metaphorical support in Mormon thought.
I’m reminded in this respect of Tolkien’s distinction between applicability and allegory. The one, he said, “resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” Of course, Tolkien’s words about allegory should be taken with a grain of salt, considering that he clearly authored at least one allegory (“Leaf by Niggle,” and arguably “Smith of Wooton Major” as well, though I find the latter less clearcut).
So Lowell could be making a similar claim for poetry: that while others can find meaning in it, that is a very different thing from the author putting meaning into it. So that poetry (or story, or art of any kind) becomes another aspect of lived experience, part of the universe itself.
And yet that is *not* the argument she is making. She doesn’t claim that poetry is justified by its Truth, i.e., its status as a form of alternate reality. Rather, she roots it in a claim for “created beauty.”
But wait! What about those of us for whom the universe itself is a kind of “created beauty” — who, like Tolkien, claim that “We make still by the law in which we’re made” (from his poem “Mythopoeia”).
(And apologies for turning away a discussion of the craft of poetry to one of the Meaning of Poetry. Which is at least arguably a violation of the spirit of what Dennis is trying to do here…)
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I’m sorry I missed this post a year ago. This is just what I needed.