A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology

“It is not merely an assembly of verse, but the spiritual record of an entire people.” — This from the wrapper of A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology. The spiritual record of an entire people sounds rather impressive. The book as a matter of fact is a collection of pleasant verse, neat and nice and easy as eating candy.

Naturally, any collection of contemporary verse in any country at any time is bound to be more or less a box of candy. Days of Horace, days of Milton, days of Whitman, it would be pretty much the same, more or less a box of candy. Would it be at the same time the spiritual record of an entire people? Why not? If we had a good representative anthology of the poetry of Whitman’s day, and if it contained two poems by Whitman, then it would be a fairly true spiritual record of the American people of that day. As if the whole nation had whispered or chanted its inner experience into the horn of a gramophone.

And the bulk of the whisperings and murmurings would be candy: sweet nothings, tender trifles, and amusing things. For of such is the bulk of the spiritual experience of any entire people.

The Americans have always been good at “occasional” verse. Sixty years ago they were very good indeed: making their little joke against themselves and their century. T oday there are fewer jokes. There are also fewer footprints on the sands of time. Life is still earnest, but a little less real. And the soul has left off asserting that dust it isn’t nor to dust returneth. The spirit of verse prefers now a “composition salad” of fruits of sensation, in a cooked mayonnaise of sympathy. Odds and ends of feelings smoothed into unison by some prevailing sentiment:

My face is wet with the rain

But my heart is warm to the core. . . .

Or you can call it a box of chocolate candies. Let me offer you a sweet! Candy! Isn’t everything candy?

There be none of beauty’s daughters

With a magic like thee —

And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me.

Is that candy? Then what about this?

But you are a girl and run

Fresh bathed and warm and sweet.

After the flying ball

On little, sandalled feet.

One of those two fragments is a classic. And one is a scrap from the contemporary spiritual record.

The river boat had loitered down its way,

The ropes were coiled, and business for the day

Was done

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds;

Save where

Two more bits. Do you see any intrinsic difference between them? After all, the one means as much as the other. And what is there in the mere stringing together of words?

For some mysterious reason, there is everything.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed

It is a string of words, but it makes me prick my innermost ear. So do I prick my ear to: “Fly low, vermilion dragon.” But the next line: “With the moon horns,” makes me lower that same inward ear once more, in indifference.

There is an element of danger in all new utterance. We prick our ears like an animal in a wood at a strange sound.

Alas! though there is a modicum of “strange sound” in this contemporary spiritual record, we are not the animal to prick our ears at it. Sounds sweetly familiar, linked in a new crochet pattern. “Christ, what are patterns for?” But why invoke Deity? Ask the Ladies’ Home Journal. You may know a new utterance by the element of danger in it. “My heart aches,” says Keats, and you bet it’s no joke.

Why do I think of stairways

With a rush of hurt surprise?

Heaven knows, my dear, unless you once fell down.

The element of danger. Man is always, all the time and for ever on the brink of the unknown. The minute you realize this, you prick your ears in alarm. And the minute any man steps alone, with his whole naked self, emotional and mental, into the everlasting hinterland of consciousness, you hate him and you wonder over him. Why can’t he stay cozily playing word-games around the camp fire?

Now it is time to invoke the Deity, who made man an adventurer into the everlasting unknown of consciousness.

The spiritual record of any people is 99 per cent a record of games around a camp fire: word-games and picture-games. But the one per cent is a step into the grisly dark, which is for ever dangerous and wonderful. Nothing is wonderful unless it is dangerous. Dangerous to the status quo of the soul. And therefore to some degree detestable.

When the contemporary spiritual record warbles away about the wonder of the blue sky and the changing seas, etc., etc., etc., it is all candy. The sky is a blue hand-mirror to the modern poet and he goes on smirking before it. The blue sky of our particular heavens is painfully well known to us all. In fact, it is like the glass bowl to the goldfish, a ne plus ultra in which he sees himself as he goes round and round.

The actual heavens can suddenly roll up like the heavens of Ezekiel. That’s what happened at the Renaissance. The old heavens shrivelled and men found a new empyrean above them. But they didn’t get at it by playing word-games around the camp fire. Somebody has to jump like a desperate clown through the vast blue hoop of the upper air. Or hack a slow way through the dome of crystal.

Play! Play! Play! All the little playboys and playgirls of the western world, playing at goodness, playing at badness, playing at sadness, and playing deafeningly at gladness. Playboys and playgirls of the western world, harmlessly fulfilling their higher destinies and registering the spiritual record of an entire people. Even playing at death, and playing with death. Oh, poetry, you child in a bathing- dress, playing at ball!

You say nature is always nature, the sky is always the sky. But sit still and consider for one moment what sort of nature it was the Romans saw on the face of the earth, and what sort of heavens the medievals knew above them, and your sky will begin to crack like glass. The world is what it is, and the chimerical universe of the ancients was always child’s play. The camera cannot lie. And the eye of man is nothing but a camera photographing the outer world in colour-process.

This sounds very well. But the eye of man photographs the chimera of nature, as well as the so-called scientific vision. The eye of man photographs gorgons and chimeras, as the eye of the spider photographs images unrecognizable to us and the eye of the horse photographs flat ghosts and looming motions. We are at the phase of scientific vision. This phase will pass and this vision will seem as chimerical to our descendants as the medieval vision seems to us.

The upshot of it all is that we are pot-bound in our consciousness. We are like a fish in a glass bowl, swimming round and round and gaping at our own image reflected on the walls of the infinite: the infinite being the glass bowl of our conception of life and the universe. We are prisoners inside our own conception of life and being. We have exhausted the possibilities of the universe, as we know it. All that remains is to telephone to Mars for a new word of advice.

Our consciousness is pot-bound. Our ideas, our emotions, our experiences are all pot-bound. For us there is nothing new under the sun. What there is to know, we know it already, and experience adds little. The girl who is going to fall in love knows all about it beforehand from books and the movies. She knows what she wants and she wants what she knows. Like candy. It is still nice to eat candy, though one has eaten it every day for years. It is still nice to eat candy. But the spiritual record of eating candy is a rather thin noise.

There is nothing new under the sun, once the consciousness becomes pot-bound. And this is what ails all art today. But particularly American art. The American consciousness is peculiarly pot-bound. It doesn’t even have that little hole in the bottom of the pot through which desperate roots straggle. No, the American consciousness is not only potted in a solid and everlasting pot, it is placed moreover in an immovable ornamental vase. A double hide to bind it and a double bond to hide it.

European consciousness still has cracks in its vessel and a hole in the bottom of its absoluteness. It still has strange roots of memory groping down to the heart of the world.

But American consciousness is absolutely free of such danglers. It is free from all loop-holes and crevices of escape. It is absolutely safe inside a solid and ornamental concept of life. There it is Free! Life is good, and all men are meant to have a good time. Life is good! that is the flower-pot. The ornamental vase is: Having a good time.

So they proceed to have it, even with their woes. The young maiden knows exactly when she falls in love: she knows exactly how she feels when her lover or husband betrays her or when she betrays him: she knows precisely what it is to be a forsaken wife, an adoring mother, an erratic grandmother. All at the age of eighteen.

Vive la vie!

There is nothing new under the sun, but you can have a jolly good old time all the same with the old things. A nut sundae or a new beau, a baby or an automobile, a divorce or a troublesome appendix: my dear, that’s Life! You’ve got to get a good time out of it, anyhow, so here goes!

In which attitude there is a certain piquant stoicism. The stoicism of having a good time. The heroism of enjoying yourself. But, as I say, it makes rather thin hearing in a spiritual record. Rechauffes of rechauffes. Old soup of old bones of life, heated up again for a new consomme. Nearly always called printaniere.

I know a forest, stilly-deep . . .

Mark the poetic novelty of stilly-deep, and then say there is nothing new under the sun.

My soul-harp never thrills to peaceful tunes;

I should say so.

For after all, the thing to do

Is just to put your heart in song —

Or in pickle.

I sometimes wish that God were back

In this dark world and wide;

For though some virtues he might lack,

He had his pleasant side.

“Getting on the pleasant side of God, and how to stay there.” — Hints by a Student of Life.

Oh, ho! Now I am. masterful!

Now I am filled with power.

Now I am brutally myself again

And my own man.

For I have been among my hills today,

On the scarred dumb rocks standing;

And it made a man of him . . .

Open confession is good for the soul.

The spiritual record of an entire . . . what?