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COLORS OF LIFE

NEW POETRY: FALL 1918

_By Robert Graves_ FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS

_By Gilbert Frankau_ THE OTHER SIDE

_By Max Eastman_ COLORS OF LIFE

_By Kahlil Gibran_ THE MADMAN

COLORS OF LIFE

POEMS AND SONGS AND SONNETS

BY MAX EASTMAN

NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVIII

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PREFACE

ABOUT AMERICAN POETRY

It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather than my share in the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it. That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies, and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided being there. I have found that rather in individual experience and in those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I loved it first for myself. Its essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth, and it can not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never entered, even so deeply as it might, into those tempests of social change that are coloring our thoughts today.

Poetry that has life for its subject, and untempered reality, is rather expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in admiration to Poe, and they were the poets of reality and those who touched the mood of social revolt. And for my part I think there is a modern validity in the attitudes of both these poets, and a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.

Every one who reads this book will be familiar, I suppose, with Walt Whitman's ideal of an American poetry so free and strong and untrammelled of ornamentation that it should go out of the books it was published in and stand up with the hills and forests on the earth. "The Poetry of the future," he said.

CONTENTS

AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY--A PREFACE 13

POEMS

COMING TO PORT 43

THE LONELY BATHER 45

IN MY ROOM 46

HOURS 47

FIRE AND WATER 48

YOU MAKE NO ANSWER 49

OUT OF A DARK NIGHT 50

A MORNING 51

ANNIVERSARY 52

AUTUMN LIGHT 53

A MODERN MESSIAH 54

IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL 55

A VISIT 56

TO LOVE 58

CAR-WINDOW 59

LITTLE FISHES 60

INVOCATION 61

SOMETIMES 62

TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN 63

TO AN ACTRESS 65

EYES 66

X RAYS 67

SONNETS

A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS 71

A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT 74

THOSE YOU DINED WITH 75

THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD 76

AS THE CRAG EAGLE 77

TO MY FATHER 78

TO EDWARD S. MARTIN 79

EUROPE--1914 80

ISADORA DUNCAN 81

THE SUN 82

THE NET 83

A DUNE SONNET 84

SONGS

SEA-SHORE 87

RAINY SONG 88

A HYMN TO GOD 90

COMING SPRING 91

DAISIES 92

BOBOLINK 93

DIOGENES 94

EARLIER POEMS

A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY 97

AT THE AQUARIUM 102

EARTH'S NIGHT 103

THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS 104

TO THE ASCENDING MOON 107

LEIF ERICSON 110

MIDNIGHT 116

IN MARCH 117

THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH 118

TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT 120

IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA 121

TO A TAWNY THRUSH 125

THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES 127

SUMMER SUNDAY 129

AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY

A PREFACE

It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it. That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies, and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth. It can not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change that are coloring our thoughts today.

Poetry that has life for its subject, and democratic reality, is rather expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in admiration to Poe, and they were poets of reality, and those who touched the mood of democratic revolt. And for my part I think there is a modern validity in the attitudes of both these poets, a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose; and that is what I should like to discuss with those who may enter sympathetically into this little volume.

They will all be familiar, I suppose, with Walt Whitman's ideal of an American poetry so free and strong and untrammelled of ornamentation, that it should go out of the books it was published in and stand up with the hills and forests on the earth.

"The poetry of the future," he said, "aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish....

"In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great and fitting parts--that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably render'd in rhyming verse--that there have been very illustrious poets whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately envelopt--and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty, on some of our own age--it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as a medium of highest aesthetic practical or spiritual expression, present or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado, dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride, passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul--to the general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray them to us--to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder presses--to the thought of the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth--to the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or on ship-board, or on lakes and rivers--resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more eligible--soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose."

It may surprise some people to see this monumental challenge to the poets of the future confronted with the pathetic memory of Edgar Allan Poe. And yet it is natural to place these two poets in contrast, and the weight neither of genius nor of influence is altogether upon one side. They are the two American poets of unique distinction, and they are the fountains of the two strongest influences in all modern poetry of the occident. And it is worth observing that if Walt Whitman had written as few pages of poetry as Poe did, his name would hardly be remembered, whereas Poe would have established a literary tradition if he had written but five sorrowful lyrics. His individuality was so poignant. His art was so exquisite. And not only was his art exquisite, but his philosophy of his art was as unique, assertive, and prodigious in contempt for his predecessors, as that of Walt Whitman. I have never read anything about any art more sheer and startling in its kind, than Poe's essay on "The Philosophy of Composition"; and nothing more energetically opposite to Walt Whitman could possibly be devised. To convey the flavor of the contrast, I quote these sentences--inadequate for any other purpose--from Poe's essay:

"Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches....

"For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor at any time the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and, since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I have considered a _desideratum_, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the _modus operandi_ by which some one of my own works was put together. I select 'The Raven' as most generally known....

"Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem _per se_, the circumstance--or say the necessity--which in the first place gave rise to the intention of composing _a_ poem that should suit at once the popular and critical taste.

"We commence, then, with this intention.

"The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression; for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed....

"My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work _universally_ appreciable. I should be carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and which with the poetical stands not in the slightest need of demonstration--the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem....

"But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required: first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, second, some amount of suggestiveness, some under-current, however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that _richness_ (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with _the ideal_."

The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete. Upon the one side a vast preoccupation with human meaning and morals, with health and the common reality and love and democracy, a grand contempt for beauty, and for the effort to attract or gratify a reader with "verbal melody," a contempt for everything that savors of deliberate technique in art. Upon the other side also contempt--contempt like a piece of cold analytical steel for every pretense that the technique of art is not deliberate, that poets are not seeking to attract and gratify, that truth or moral or meaning instead of beauty is the portent of a poem--a disposition to seek beauty in unique and even unhealthy places, a lonely aristocratic heart of pain, and a preoccupation with "verbal melody" never before or since equalled in poetry. The details of this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what will illumine the modern problems about poetry. To Edgar Allan Poe a poem was an objective thing, to Walt Whitman poetry was an act of subjective expression. Poe would take sounds and melodies of words almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had formed a beautiful vessel, and he would take emotions and imaginations out of his heart and weave and inlay them in that vessel, and even the crimson out of his blood, and finally for "enrichment" he would seek out in his mind the hue of some meaning or moral to pour over it until it was perfect. And these beautiful vessels he would set forth for view and purchase, standing aside from them like a creative trader, proud, but no more identified with them than as though he had made them out of the colors of shells. To Walt Whitman a poem was not a thing. His poetry was himself. His meanings, emotions, experiences, love and wonder of life, filled him and he overflowed in language--without "art," without purpose but to communicate his being. So he maintained. His poem was never an object to him, even after it had flowed full and he sought to perfect its contours. His emendations were not often objective improvements; they were private remodellings to make the language a more direct and fluent identity with what he considered himself. This was the task upon which he labored as the poet of democracy and social love.

Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection upon America or upon human nature, that Walt Whitman, with all his yearnings over the average American and his offering of priesthood and poetry to the people, should remain the poet of a rather esoteric few, whereas Poe--even with the handful of poems he wrote--may be said to be acceptable to the generality of men. The Raven, or Helen, or Annabelle Lee, or some sad musical echo of the death of beauty, might be found in illuminated covers on the most "average" of American parlor tables, but never anything there of Walt Whitman--unless it be "Captain, My Captain!" the one rather weak metrical poem he deigned to write. And there is something deeply and really pathetic in this fact, and something which only an adequate science of verse can explain. For the emotions and the meanings of Walt Whitman's poetry are actually the ones that interest simple and thoughtful people who have leisure to feel. His realizations of life would be acceptable and be honored, as much at least as great art is ever honored, by the "divine average," if they had been conveyed, as Poe's were, in vessels of light, which would make them objective, and from which they might brim over with excess of subjective meaning and emotion.

I do not mean to express a wish that Walt Whitman had conveyed them so, or the opinion that he could have been a more stupendous poetic and moral hero of nature by writing otherwise than he did. His propulsive determination to put forth in this facile nineteenth century culture, sweet with the decay and light with the remnant fineries of feudal grandeur, the original, vast, unfinished substance of man, was a phenomenon like the rising of a volcanic continent amid ships on the sea. No word but the words in his book can portray the magnitude of his achievement; no critic but Envy could judge it except as itself and by its own standard. But as a prophetic example of the poems of the future, and especially the poems of democracy and social love, it suffers a weakness--the weakness that Walt Whitman's character suffered. It is egocentric and a little inconsiderate of the importance of other people. Walt Whitman composed wonderful passages about universal social love, but he could not be the universal poet exactly because he was not social enough. He was not humble enough to be social. The rebel egoism of democracy was in him the lordly and compelling thing, and though his love for the world was prodigious, it was not the kind of love that gives attention instinctively to the egoism of others.

There may be no grand passion for the idea, but there is a natural companionship with the fact of "democracy," in Poe's statement that he "kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable," and that statement more characteristically distinguishes his attitude from Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had of talking about beauty. All poets who mould their poems objectively, even though they may conceive themselves to be utterly alone with beauty, are really in social communion with humanity. For that is what the word _objective_ means. An object, or as we say, a "thing," differs from other elements of our experience only in that it can be experienced in the same form at different times and by different persons. And for an object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in itself, so that various perceivers may come from all sides and find it there. Therefore one who moulds an object towards external perfection, however sad his solitude, enters directly into the "universal friendship" toward which Walt Whitman directed so much of the longing of his words. One who pours out phrases direct from his emotion may experience a relief and glory that implies listeners, and he may win listeners, but they will each rebuild out of his phrases their own different poem, and they will comprise in their number only those endowed with the special power to build poems out of phrases poured out. And whatever we may wish were true of the world, it is not true that the majority are so endowed. Therefore the poetry that is highly subjective is almost inevitably the poetry of a few; and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves a less clear and general social communion than the embodiment of emotion in an object of art.

It could be established, I believe, with mechanical precision, that the rhythmic values most cherished by the social rebels who now write so much "free verse," are values practically incommunicable to others, and absolutely incommunicable by the method usually adopted, that of printing words on a page. A little of that icy matter-of-fact realism with which Poe used to scatter the sweet foggy thoughts of the literarious, while it might not affect the art of these poets, would surely reduce the volume of what they have to say about it. For instance, here is the answer of one of them to an assertion that the line division in free-verse is "arbitrary," and that if we copied one of these long poems in solid prose, the poet himself could hardly ever divide it again as it was:

"Free verse that is free verse is _not_ arbitrary. Much of it is, of course--so are many canvases mere splashy imitations of Matisse. But there is free verse that resolves itself into just those lines--a little more subtly than sonnets or triolets--by virtue of pauses, of heart-beats, of the quickness or slowness of your breath, and maybe of your pulse itself.... It tries to give the rhythm value of those hesitations, those quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, the flutterings--it is _closer to the breath_, as modern music and modern dance are, or as primitive music and primitive dance were."