Amy Lowell

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Text originally published in 1926 under the same title.

© Valmy Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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AMY LOWELL

BY

CLEMENT WOOD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

I—THE BREACH IN THE WALL 5

II—CHILDHOOD DAYS AND BLACK CIGARS 11

III—A ROOSEVELT AMONG PARNASSIANS 28

IV—THE BROOKLINE RHADAMANTHUS 48

V—THE IMPASSIONED HEART 66

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 89

DEDICATION

To

the memory of

JOHN KEATS

I—THE BREACH IN THE WALL

American poetry is a young and rising shore, measured beside the intricate continental expanse, the reach of ancient broken hill-land, of English song. The English folk ballads had lifted the soil like woodland violets, stern Langland and gay Chaucer had sung in the morning, before the prow of the Santa Maria grounded on the Caribbean beach, and newfound America became an out-put of old Europe. The wide, high music of Elizabeth’s day, the winding glamour of Spenser, the heaving wonder of Shakespeare and the dramatists, the heaven-song of Campion and the lutanists—all this had dulled, before Jamestown and Plymouth Rock felt the lasting tread of English corners. Puritan Milton and the cavalier minnesingers, and then the long age of the rhymed epigram, sparkled and dimmed, before Concord, Valley Forge and Yorktown had been written in as slogans in the glossary of man’s slow stumble toward liberty. A new burst of lyric beauty made the mother air sweet, Burns and Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott and Byron, Shelley and Keats—and still America, young and tongue-tied, stared toward the homeland crests.

Not that we were entirely dumb: there had been juvenile Colonial stammerings of fugitive Southern lyricists, of Bay Psalm Books, of such provincial Shakespeares as the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, whose laborious rhymes made him a gem among Harvard graduates. Silenced vocally in his pastorate by an affection of the lungs, Wigglesworth lifted strains which passed through six American and one London edition.

Still was the night, serene and bright,

When all men sleeping lay;

Calm was the season, and carnal reason

Thought so ‘twould last for aye.

Thus cantered his The Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, with a Short Discourse about Eternity, its Puritan rigor mollified a bit, as when he allots to the infants subject to damnation,——

Although in bliss

They may not hope to dwell,

Still unto them He will allow

The easiest room in hell.

Somewhat in this mood America began its song. England, with voices that sang at heaven’s gate, saw no reason to tremble for the repose of its poetic crown.

Bryant was born the year before Keats; but the New York and New England groups stretched principally through Victoria’s reign. The other side heard Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and their compeers; only in Poe and Whitman, upon this shore, did we hear poetry to be mentioned quietly beside England’s best. When the first American age of poetry passed, a fallow half century swung in, hardly broken by the brief troubled music of Sidney Lanier, and the beauty of Emily Dickinson’s walled singing. Today, England drowses through the pipings of the tepid Georgians, for all of the young poignancy of Housman, the thunder of Chesterton, the surge of Masefield, the small gray magic of de la Mare. And America today—is she still a laggard in poetry, that concentrated essence of the soul’s uttered desires?

Shortly after 1910, an epidemic of poetry swept through these States. It was as contagious as laughter or the measles, and almost as virulent as the virus Elizabethiensis. It rooted in Whitman, at times diluted through a Gallic sieve, and Poe; in drained New England and the adolescent West; in the Congo and Spoon River; in the city called Han and the ticking of Eternity. America rioted in poetry. If it did not usurp the headlines, it at least reached the stage where a man who confessed to poetry was not at once committed for observation. Soon after 1915, the vast pot had simmered down somewhat, and above the ebullient cacophony there stood out as the dominant figures of the poetic renascence in the public eye, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay. The critical eye, in the main, was similar in its appraisal. Ten years dragged by, with Europe red with war and its aftermath, and America tardily torn by the same slow social suicide. In the public eye, American poetry was still the same six, with the possible addition of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie; though critical opinion cast eyes askance at the later work of Masters and Lindsay, though a rare Hosea cried out against the bard of Brookline, though a more frequent dilettante of the intelligentsia squealed a wild pæan to strange sayers like Eliot, Kreymborg, Bodenheim.

And then, without warning, the great besieger bore up against the citadel in the night, and tore a breach that let in a hateful void of sky. Amy Lowell, vigorous fighter, brilliant innovator and artificer of words, had died—died in her fifty-first year, when the popular home acclaim to her two-volume John Keats had just raised it to the best seller class, and when harsh overseas words had just begun to come in. It was Death’s first blow at the important figures in the modern revival of our poetry; and it is not an exaggeration to say that the victim was, in the eyes of no inconsiderable portion of our land, pre-eminently modern American poetry itself. Her glittering verses, her militant prefaces and critical studies, her constant packed platform appearances had elevated her to a commanding place. She died—America drew a sudden startled breath.

Amy Lowell, in her verse and her ample theories about verse, was, is, and may be an important formative influence upon the poets of today and tomorrow. Her words speak for themselves, at least on the surface. Had they best be left so, with perhaps an orderly eulogy in the nature of a biography, and a few academic volumes of undiscriminating tribute? A Rotary eulogy, with sloganeer boosts....Or is this the hour for the critic to speak: that what was enduring and well-visioned in her work may be seen as such, and may influence as such; and that what was momentary only and woven of shoddy shall be so ticketed, lest, as too often, the men and women lashed into poetry by the inescapable inner compulsion, consecrate the flicker, not the flame? It is a wise emendation, de mortuis nil nisi veritatem, of the dead speak nothing but the truth—the truth, as well as it may be seen. A temporary harm, which breeds a permanent warping of values, may come from uncritical adulation, in the dawn after death no less than at any other time. Now, while her echoes ring in our ears, and her still unspread words are damp on the printed page, is the time for at least a tentative appraisal of what she stood for, and what she achieved.

There is need for walking delicately in the presence of such a task. In dealing with a contemporary, the air above the living head or the wilting flowers is sullen with prejudices and drizzly with unearned reverences, in perhaps every instance. One is on bedrock in venturing a pronouncement upon the worth of the unearthed Sapphic fragments, even if it be a bedrock largely of ignorance; one has neither been honored nor slighted at board by the singer of Lesbos, nor suffered from her loose praise or blame; the faint high song has neither a cloud of waspish detractors nor a fanatic claque. There is an inevitable illusion of the near; yet intelligence may discount this, and see the living fern as no more and no less than the darker lacework stoned toward immortality in the coal measures. The poet cannot evade the responsibility for true talk on his own living craft. We have Symons’ astute word for it that only in the hands of a poet can criticism of poetry be the winged thing it should be. The poet, says Baudelaire, must contain a critic; and his criticism must emanate from the same deeps of his spirit, sharpened by the same whittle of the intellect, that in its time produces his own poetry.

Criticism, Symons elaborates, is a valuation of forces, and is indifferent to their direction. Its aim is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a writer. To do this it must interpret, share publicly the poet’s aim, let his ware be sampled. It concerns itself with the root principles of human nature, with fundamental ideas. It must innately reveal the deepest philosophy of the critic throughout, if it is to be more than verbal back-scratching, friendly or the reverse. Paul Elmer More said well that it must stand entirely aloof from the currents of