Poetry, July 1915

A line of trees runs through the July 1915 issue of Poetry, kind of like a windbreak in a pasture.  This might be true of every Poetry a century ago, and perhaps the current ones as well. But since this is my first review of an issue, it’s enough of a motif to organize around.

In “Polonius and the Ballad Singers,” Padraic Colum gives us one folk ballad and a few folkish songs he made up (he acknowledges this in a postscript).  It’s a little confusing what Polonius is doing in Connacht.  Perhaps a knock at treacherous counselors depriving Ireland of independence even as they consume the island’s old culture?  Or just a whim written because Colum really likes Hamlet?  

One of the balladeers explains his song:

‘Tis nearly native; something blown here

And since made racy—like yon tree, I might say,

Native by influence if not by species,

Shaped by our winds. You understand, I think?

Maybe. But a racy tree? A little OEDing reveals that racy once had a meaning more like terroir, a wine that revealed its origins by the strong, characteristic taste of the soil it was grown in.  By the early twentieth century, racy as mildly scandalous was gaining ground, giving Colum a double meaning here, referring both to the transmutation of a song by its Irish context and the ballad’s piquant content.

Frances Shaw has a series of poems in this issue.  She doesn’t appear anywhere else in the MJP except in Poetry before 1918, but her poem “Who Loves the Rain” is pretty widely anthologized.  Her poems in this issue seem to me careful and pretty, affection-inspiring.  They remind me so much of the poetry I attempted to write as a young teenager.  To keep with the theme, and redoubling my affection, there’s this stanza in the voice of a tree from “Three Voices” (the others of which are the wind and some lovelorn feminine soul):

The Tree:

A wind of pain and longing

Strips my boughs of their spring-time.

I bow, and rock, and sweep the ground ;

Then, in the silence, hold me listening.

Is this the after-calm in life,

Or is it death ?

Max Michelson’s “O Brother Tree” very ardently wonders about what it’s like to be a tree, which is a very necessary and good thing to do.  But that’s certainly the most interesting aspect of the poem.  

Leyland Huckfield’s gothic poems follow and are gruesomely concerned with demon women in church and a son’s temptation to kill his father with a sickle, presumably because he’s been hauled out of bed to reap for hours before sunrise.  Not a forest in sight of those.

The gothic continues with the “The Old South” by John Gould Fletcher.  It is dedicated to H.D. and it’s unredeemably stuffed with contradictory descriptions and stereotypes.  See the trees that are “dumb-stricken ghosts in flight.” However, there is a paragraph in which every sentence begins with “let us go.”  Given the presence of Polonius and also Harriet Monroe’s review of Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys, concerned with the Grand Style, I’m having a really good time imagining Eliot reading this issue of poetry and conjuring Prufrock’s voice.

There follows an article about how kids write great poetry until adults ruin it.  Alice Oliver Henderson’s poems seem to bear it out relatively well.  “And how pretty the trees are growing” she observes.

Shortly afterwards, Monroe takes a similar tack, decrying dramatists more interested in wearing ribbons and imparting tones than in pushing at the edges of art’s capabilities.  In a review of Earth Deities and Other Rhythmic Masques by Bliss Carman and Mary Perry King, after complaining about having to judge amateur plays intended to be staged by genteel urban outdoors clubs in the summer while members traipse through wooded parks, H.M. implores, “Is there no one who can put some life into this kind of thing? Can we not have a vital and beautiful response to a vital and beautiful demand?” One wonders how vital and if anyone leaps to action who hears Monroe’s call for something more substantial than a reworking of vegetable myths in archaic diction.  (In a review concerned largely with William Cullen Bryant, H.M. writes, “Let us be careful whom we honor with monuments. Build one to Poe, who was true to his art whether drunk or sober ; to Whitman, who never sold out even to pay his debts; to Whistler, whom neither wrath nor ridicule could swerve from his purpose ; to any starveling who keeps faith with the muse and scorns a respectable old age : but not to the deserter, the wearer of ribbons, the tone-imparter." I keep wondering what she would think of the blog named after her.)

The issue ends with correspondence that makes no mention of trees.  Two letters respond with dignified indignity to anti-German culture propaganda run in the previous issue of Poetry.  Perhaps those two letters, both adamant that “the dreadnoughts of England, and the howitzers of Germany have nothing to do with poetry,” indicate some chagrin on the part of the editorial staff for including Wilenski’s article in the first place.

Finally, there are notable backpage adverts for Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Sonnets and Ballate, and two volumes of his own poems, the “War Number” of BLAST, and a note in The Drama’s advertisement that its current issue includes Fenollosa’s (and Pound’s) “Noh”, which happily enough includes a discussion of the Noh’s emblematic pine tree.