Grant M. Overton

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I have to tell about a number of poets and, regarding poets, I agree with a very clever woman I know who declares that poetry is the most personal of the arts and who further says that it is manifestly inadequate to talk about a poet’s work without giving a sample of his poetry. So, generally, I shall quote one of the shorter poems or a passage from a longer poem.

John Dos Passos, known for Three Soldiers and for Rosinante to the Road Again, will be still more variously known to those who read his book of verse, A Pushcart at the Curb. This book bears a relation to Rosinante, the contents grouping themselves under these general headings:

I will select for quotation the sixth or final poem dedicated to A. K. McC. from the section entitled “Quai de la Tournelle,”

Christopher Morley is too well-known as a poet to require any explicit account in this place. I shall remind you of the pleasure of reading him by quoting the “Song For a Little House” from his book, The Rocking Horse, and also a short verse from his Translations from the Chinese.

But there is a different temper—or, if you like, tempering—to the verse in Translations from the Chinese. I quote “A National Frailty”:

In speaking of the late Joyce Kilmer, the temptation is inescapable to quote his “Trees”; after all, it is his best known and best loved poem—in certain moments it is his best poem! But instead, I will desert his volume, Trees and Other Poems, and from his other book, Main Street and Other Poems, I will quote the first two stanzas of Kilmer’s “Houses”—a poem written for his wife:

Mrs. Kilmer is the author of two volumes of verse which have sold rather more than John Masefield usually sells—at least, until the publication of Reynard the Fox. Candles That Burn created her audience and Vigils has been that audience’s renewed delight. From Vigils I take the poem “The Touch of Tears.” In it “Michael” is, of course, her own son:

I think I have said elsewhere that J. C. Squire prefers his serious poems to those parodies of which he is such an admitted master. It seems only decent to defer, in this place, to the author’s own feeling in the matter. Mr. Squire is the author of The Birds and Other Poems and Poems: Second Series. My present choice is the beginning and the close of the poem, “Harlequin”—which is in both books:

Milton Raison is a young writer, known especially to readers of The Bookman, whose verse has appeared in various magazines. A Russian, Milton Raison went to sea as a boy—he is scarcely more than a boy now. His first book of verse, Spindrift, carries a preface by William McFee. I quote:

“There is a Latin sharpness of mentality manifested in these clearly, sardonically etched portraits of a ship’s crew. The whimsical humour revealed in final lines is a portent, in the present writer’s opinion, of a talent which will probably come to maturity in a very different field. Indeed it may be, though it is too early to dogmatise, that these poems are but the early efflorescence of a gift for vigorous prose narrative.

“Mr. Milton Raison has settled for himself, with engaging promptitude, that a seafaring career provides the inspiration he craves. The influence of Masefield is strong upon him, and some of his verses are plainly derivative. As already hinted, it is too early to say definitely how this plan will succeed. In his diary, kept while on a voyage to South America, a document remarkable for its descriptive power and a certain crude and virginal candour, one may discover an embryo novelist struggling with the inevitable limitations of youth. But in his simple and naÏve poems, whether they give us some bizarre and catastrophic picture of seamen, or depict the charming emotions of a sensitive adolescence, there is a passion for experiment and humility of intellect which promises well enough for a young man in his teens.”

I find it particularly difficult to choose a poem for citation from this book. Perhaps I shall do as well as I can, with only space to quote one poem, if I give you “Vision”:

It seems as if, The First Person Singular having been published, more people now know William Rose BenÉt as a novelist than as a poet. I cannot help feeling that to be something of a pity. I am not going to quote one of Mr. BenÉt’s poems—indeed all his best work is in quite long and semi-narrative verse—but I will give you what Don Marquis was inspired to write after reading BenÉt’s Moons of Grandeur. On looking at it again, I see that Mr. Marquis has quoted eight lines, so you shall have your taste of William Rose BenÉt, the poet, after all!

“Some day, just to please ourself, we intend to make a compilation of poems that we love best; the ones that we turn to again and again. There will be in the volume the six odes of Keats, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’; Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’; Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’; William Rose BenÉt’s ‘Man Possessed’ and very little else.

“We don’t ‘defend’ these poems ... no doubt they are all of them quite indefensible, in the light of certain special poetic revelations of the last few years ... and we have no particular theories about them; we merely yield ourself to them, and they transport us; we are careless of reason in the matter, for they cast a spell upon us. We do not mean to say that we are in the category with the person who says: ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like’—On the contrary, we know exactly why we like these things, although we don’t intend to take the trouble to tell you now.

“William Rose BenÉt has published another book of poems, Moons of Grandeur. Here is a stanza picked up at random—it happens to be the opening stanza of ‘Gaspara Stampa’—which shows the lyric quality of the verse:

“Was BenÉt ever in Italy? No matter ... he has Italy in him, in his heart and brain. Italy and Egypt and every other country that was ever warmed by the sun of beauty and shone on by the stars of romance. For the poems in this book are woven of the stuff of sheer romance. There is nothing else in the world as depressing as a romantic poem that doesn’t ‘get there.’ And to us, at least, there is nothing as thrilling as the authentic voice of romance, the genuine utterance of the soul that walks in communion with beauty. Moons of Grandeur is a ringing bell and a glimmering tapestry and a draught of sparkling wine.

“A certain rich intricacy of pattern distinguishes the physical body of BenÉt’s art; when he chooses he can use words as if they were the jewelled particles of a mosaic; familiar words, with his handling, become ‘something rich and strange.’ Of the spiritual content of his poems, we can say nothing adequate, because there is not much that can be said of spirit; either it is there and you feel it, and it works upon you, or it is not there. There are very few people writing verse today who have the power to charm us and enchant us and carry us away with them as BenÉt can. He has found the horse with wings.”

The Bookman Anthology of Verse (1922), edited by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, is an altogether extraordinary anthology to be made up from the poets contributing to a single magazine in eighteen consecutive months. Among those who are represented are: Franklin P. Adams, Karle Wilson Baker, Maxwell Bodenheim, Hilda Conkling, John Dos Passos, Zona Gale, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, David Morton, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Siegfried Sassoon, Sara Teasdale, Louis and Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Elinor Wylie.

Mr. Farrar has written short introductions to the example (or examples) of the work of each poet. In his general preface he says:

“Where most anthologies of poetry are collected for the purpose of giving pleasure by means of the verses themselves, I have tried here to give you something of the joy to be found in securing manuscripts, in attempting to understand current poetry by a broadening of taste to match broadening literary tendencies; and, perhaps most important of all, to present you to the poets themselves as I know them by actual meeting or correspondence.”

I will choose what Mr. Farrar says about Hilda Conkling, prefacing her poem “Lonely Song”; and then I will quote the poem:

“A shy, but normal little girl, twelve years old now, nine when her first volume of verses appeared, Hilda Conkling is not so much the infant prodigy as a clear proof that the child mind, before the precious spark is destroyed, possesses both vision and the ability to express it in natural and beautiful rhythm. Grace Hazard Conkling, herself a poet, is Hilda’s mother. They live at Northampton, Massachusetts, in the academic atmosphere of Smith College where those who know the little girl say that she enjoys sliding down a cellar stairway quite as much as she does talking of elves and gnomes. She was born in New York State, so that she is distinctly of the East. The rhythms which she uses to express her ideas are the result both of her own moods, which are often crystal-clear in their delicate imagery, and of the fact that from time to time, when she was first able to listen, her mother read aloud to her. In fact, her first poems were made before she, herself, could write them down. The speculation as to what she will do when she grows to womanhood is a common one. Is it important? A childhood filled with beauty is something to have achieved.”

This has been, as I meant it to be, a wholly serious chapter; but at the end I find I cannot stop without speaking of Keith Preston. No one who reads the Chicago Daily News fails to know Keith Preston’s delightful humour and “needle-tipped satire.” And his book, Splinters, contains all sorts of good things of which I can give you, alas, only some inadequate (because solitary) sample. Yet, anyway, here is his “Ode to Common Sense”:

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