—And Gone One Better[1]

CAESAR ZWASKA

It has come to be that on the stage, where once we watched for artists, we find only vainly strutting weak-willed human beings. We are not held, and the light within the sacred space grows dimmer. We lose all interest in places where once we have found Art.

And how desperate we have become!

The procession of the Imagists has been the only sacred thing before our eyes—thin and fragrant. Their fragility has the sap of eternity; blustering winds, blowing through the gaps back-stage, tear at them in vain. The Imagists have grown straight and strong. The beauty of their tiny procession strikes into our very hearts the emptiness, the appalling desolation, of our position.

Carl Sandburg has understood the failures and the lies and exposed the cause. He has shown the lie of your government and the farce and folly of monuments to those who kill to keep it alive. He exposes your little deaths and their perfumed sorrow and the bunk of words and antics of your Billy Sunday and fellow citizens. He has heard the “fellows saying here’s good stuff for a novel or it might be worked up into a good play,” when speaking of an Italian widow living in city slums. He has the courage and the knack of giving them the challenge—calling their bluff; and he declares with strong conviction that he’s able to back up his defiance. Who of the scatter-brains living could put her or her daughter-in-law or the working girls or the entire mob, for that matter, into a play? But he has put them, their spirit, into lines, gaunt and vivid as their lives. And I declare he is the only modern that has got it across.

This is the process of the book and of the poet’s progress: The Chicago poems; he has worked his vengeance; from the cinders and ashes, glowing still, rise sparks, brilliant and tiny. (He calls them Handfuls.) The stifling smoulder of the War poems to the warm rich glow of The Road and the End and the flame of the fire with its attendant fogs and then grim shadows. As a confession, or rather a solidifying of the entire force of the poet, he reveals the Other Days, quite as intense as the present mood. This from the last of that section:

Why should a man speak? When there are things to say, such as the Red Son, always have your lips ready to speak:

Poetry has grown stronger in your eyes?

Thus has Carl Sandburg in one book gone the entire range of a life today. The humanitarian poet as well as the artist-poet. He has proven things—and peoples. The nigger: foam of teeth ... breaking crash of laughter; Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti: with that kindling wood piled on her head, coming along Peoria street nine o’clock in the morning; Jan Kubelik: girls of Bohemia ... in the hills with their lovers; Chick Lorimer: a wild girl keeping a hold on a dream she wants; Mischa Elman: a singing fire and a climb of roses; the plowboy: turning the turf in the dusk and haze of an April gloaming; the gypsy: her neck and head the top piece of a Nile obelisk. He has known uplands when the great strong hills are humble; losses: and one day we will hold only the shadows; wars: in the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and millions of men following great causes not yet dreamed out in the heads of men; joy: sent on singing, singing, smashed to the hearts under the ribs with a terrible love; the mist: at the first of things, I will be at the last; and The Great Hunt:

The Case of Masters

In one of Whitman’s songs he speaks to those “who would assume a place to teach, or be a poet here in the States”; or, rather, he questions them, something like this:

And so on. I think the questions quoted and the rest of the poem are valuable; especially in thinking of Masters’ new book.[2] Because here are put to the lawyer, who is known as a poet, all the questions of our time. They are put to him because his first book gave us to believe that he was the first poet whom we need scrutinize closely since Whitman spoke his simplicities to the present and the next ten futures.

Masters may not cringe before these “terms obdurate.” He will point to The Spoon River Anthology. I will point to his work before the Anthology and again these later things. Masters of course loves Walt Whitman. He knows the poem from which I quoted. But Theodore Watts-Dunton—you remember him? Masters, I am sure, is more anxious and willing to accept, nay, subscribe to, the rules and judgments of this Victorian critic than to the mere words spoken in poesy of Watts-Dunton’s American contemporary, Whitman. I am almost certain of this. Masters speaks highly of Watts-Dunton’s essay on poetry. It appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Please read it and find the Masters creed. He seems ready to bow before it. If Masters wants honors as a decadent he can have them—really he has earned them. The Spoon River Anthology: its manner, joy, abandon, deepest humanity, art (all that makes it the tremendous book it is), seem to be the one great thing that Masters had to give us. The new book does not show the “truly deep poetic spirit” which Francis Hackett claims to have found in it. Such a judgment is given the lie by such poems as: St. Francis and the Lady Clare, Rain in My Heart, Simon Surnamed Peter, The City, Helen of Troy, O Glorious France, Love Is a Madness, The Altar, Soul’s Desire, Ballad of Launcelot and Elaine, In Michigan, The Star.

Our own feeble voice aside, I merely put before you words of two men—one a creator and critic, and the other a creator and human being. And I hope I have visualized for you the pathetically absurd spectacle of a “modern poet” bowing on bended knee before—. Well, why should a poet bow at all?

[1] Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. New York: Henry Holt.

[2] Songs and Satires, by Edgar Lee Masters. New York: Macmillan.