Part 1

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

by

STANTON A. COBLENTZ

BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES --:-- New York

© _Copyright 1959 by Stanton A. Coblentz_

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.