Poetry, August 1913

Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" appears here--and I'll admit that I think it is softly delightful.  You know the one.    Maybe I'm more into it than I thought I'd be because I'm sort of on the same path in some of my poetic work: trying to come to grips with the limits of poetry when confronted with the real, natural, phusi-cal world.  See if this holds water: read it not as a collection of metaphors that are intended to describe a tree, but as a series of failed attempts to poeticize something that can't be versed.  I think that I will never see a poem lovely as a tree, including all the following attempts to put a tree into poetry.  The godly sublime is the only greater factor. 

Skipwith Cannell has his Poetry debut, perhaps his global debut, in "Poems in Prose and Verse."  I am drawn to him because my friend Sarah Higginbotham is a fan.  I'll admit that most of these poems don't work for me--like John Gould Fletcher's work, they seem to be trying to be revolutionary by brute force, by escalation of intensity.  That said, the poem "Nocturne Triste" is pretty awesome in its scale-shifting.  The first line: "The iridescence of sunrise over the ocean gleams on the wings of a fly" ends up being just the first link in what becomes a webbed metaphor with no clear center.  The sunrise is in the fly, the peach is like a girl, but the fly is hovering over trash etc. It's really classically Pound-essay-enacting Imagism, following more of the rules than many more famous poems. 

Ford Madox Hueffer contributes an incredibly timely essay entitled "Impressionism: Some Speculations."  It is a lucid call for poets to write poetry that reflects their own time.  It's the pre-Eliot call for a prospective poetry, or even just a poetry of the present: "Modern life is so extraordinary, so hazy, so tenuous, with still so definite and concrete spots in it, that I am forever on the lookout for some poet who will render it with all its values" (181).  This essay is like a prophecy--the kind of poetry it asks for becomes the standard.  I will teach it next fall because it is so readably rich an articulation of the problem of experimental English poetry in the early 20th.  Modern poetry will be poetry of the "Crowd." 

And of course, I have to comment on Ezra Pound's review of Jules Romains and the Unanimistes.  His criticism is the classic Imagist put-down: Romains, for all his energy, is rhetorical: "very fine and intoxicating rhetoric, no doubt, but as poetry it harks back to the pre-Victorian era, when Shelley set out to propagandize the world" (188).  Excellent, right? 

I just moved, so I'll be catching up on a bit of a backlog over the coming weeks.