Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  (20). During the ten-year period between The Star-Treader and Ebony and Crystal (1922), there occurred changes in American poetry that would greatly affect the artistic and personal fortunes of both Smith and his mentor, George Sterling.

  American poetry at the turn of the century was in the grip of what George

  Santayana called “the genteel tradition,” which referred to a perceived split in the nation’s psyche:

  America is . . . a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of the mind—in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions—it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails. . . . The truth is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed . . . while, alongside in invention and industry and social organization the other half was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This division may be found symbolized in American architecture . . . The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper, the American intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the

  sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American

  woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition. (“The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” 39–40)

  This split, which Santayana attributed to our Calvinist heritage, resulted in a situation where “culture was something reserved and refined for the Sunday people: women, ministers, university professors and the readers of genteel magazines”

  (Cowley ii). Of these latter, Thomas Benediktsson observed that while the great literary periodicals of the nineteenth century were still regarded as sanctuaries of

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  culture, the editors of these magazines exercised their role as a literary priesthood in a largely proscriptive manner, refusing to publish “anything that could not be read by the women of the family circle” (62). Magazine poetry of the best sort was characterized by traditional Romantic motifs of escape, antiquarianism, primitivism, and the supremacy of Beauty. But almost universally Romanticism supplied

  merely a stance or a choice of subject, because it was subordinated to genteel requirements of refinement, good manners, pleasant didacticism, and sentimental-

  ity. . . . The poets of the close of the century display generous quantities of optimism, conventional piety, and sentiment, but not, unfortunately, of originality or skill. (Benediktsson 62–63)

  The most popular poets of this period included the so-called “Fireside Poets:”

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell.

  Two poets now thought of as among America’s best from the nineteenth century,

  Edgar Poe and Walt Whitman, were not part of the canon, the former being con-

  sidered too morbid and the latter too earthy.

  This is not to say that poetry which did not fit the description outlined in the preceding paragraph was not being written. There is certainly no way in which

  these lines from Stephen Crane’s War Is Kind can be termed “optimistic” or “sentimental”:

  A man said to the universe:

  “Sir, I exist!”

  “However,” replied the universe,

  “The fact has not created in me

  A sense of obligation.” (480)

  Unfortunately, editors responded in a similar manner when poets not willing

  to yield to their demands that poetry be uplifting and entertaining submitted work.

  While naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser might chal-

  lenge its tenets in prose, the economic facts of life dictated that genteelism would exert a stifling influence over American poetry. This led H. L. Mencken to “sound a revolt against that puerile kittenishness which marks so much of latter day English poetry. Nine-tenths of our living makers and singers it would seem are women, and fully two-thirds of these women are ladies. . . . Our poets are afraid of passion; the realities of life alarm them . . .” (166).

  In this “twilight interval” one of the few poets to challenge the status quo was George Sterling. Inspired by the critical principles of his friend and mentor, Ambrose Bierce, Sterling would assault the optimistic piety of the times in large part by making use of the discoveries of nineteenth-century science that were both a cause and a by-product of the great change in the nation’s character from agrarian republic to industrial democracy. Among the lessons learned from Bierce were a disdain for

  didacticism, which reduced the poem to a mere moral commonplace, and a belief

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  that while it was the task of the poet to make the reader feel, an excess of sentiment detracted from the sublimity of the poem by making it “too human.” When coupled with the scientific materialism of Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, which denied the concepts of free will, a personal deity, and the existence of an immortal human soul, Sterling became one of the first practioners of a literary school later called

  “Cosmicism” by a writer whose early stories he would later read with some bewilderment, H. P. Lovecraft. This was first evident in The Testimony of the Suns (written in 1901–02), but combined with a Schopenhauerian pessimism it would remain with

  Sterling to some degree until his death in 1926. Consider, for example, the sonnet

  “To Science,” which Sterling apparently never collected:

  And if thou slay Him, shall the ghost not rise?

  Yea! if thou conquer Him thy enemy,

  His specter from the dark shall visit thee—

  Invincible, necessitous and wise,

  The tyrant and mirage of human eyes,

  Exhaled upon the spirit’s darkened sea,

  Shares He thy moment of Eternity,

  Thy truth confronted ever with His lies.

  Thy banners gleam a little, and are furled;

  Against thy turrets surge His phantoms tow’rs;

  Drugged with His opiates the nations nod,

  Refusing still the beauty of thine hours;

  And fragile is thy tenure of this world

  Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God.

  When Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry” was published in the Hearst Cosmopoli-

  tan, among his readers was a youngster from Auburn, California (the subject of Bierce’s satire “The Perverted Village”) named Clark Ashton Smith. In Smith’s

  words, “In the ruck of magazine verse it was a fire-opal of the Titans in a potato-bin; and, after finding it, I ransacked all available contemporary periodicals for verse by George Sterling, to be rewarded, not too frequently, with some marmoreal sonnet or ‘molten golden’ lyric” ( SU 294). Smith soon began to write his own poetry, some of which found professional publication in the Overland Monthly. A schoolteacher friend of Clark was personally acquainted with Sterling, and at her encouragement he began a correspondence and a friendship which would last until Sterling’s death some fifteen years later.

  Sterling soon was acting as Smith’s mentor, dropping his name into assorted

  magazine interviews, arranging for stipends from wealthy friends to assist the pe-nurious Smith family, assisting in the preparation of the manuscript for The Star-Treader, and in general extending the favor that Bierce did for him. When Sterling received a request for contributions from a proposed magazine in Chicago, he

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  urged Smith to submit some of his work. Thus it happened that Smith was one of

  the first contributors to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.

  There had been attempts to start a magazine completely devoted to poetry be-

  fore Monroe launched her magazine, but her success in obtaining financial support from the Chicago business
community ensured that Poetry would not be reliant upon its subscriptions for its continuance. In her flyer, she outlined three principles that would guide her policy. The first was an assurance that the restrictions imposed upon poets by popular periodicals would not apply, as the assumption

  was that Poetry’ s readers actually wanted to read poetry! The second was that Poetry would publish good poetry regardless of length, character, or style; all schools were welcome. The last, and by no means the least, was that contributors would be paid for their work—only ten dollars a page, but still they would be paid. The December 1912 issue of Poetry contained three poems by Sterling, including his sonnets

  “At the Grand Cañon” and “Kindred,” both of which contained elements of

  Cosmicism, as well as two poems by Smith, “Remembered Light” and “Sorrowing

  of Winds,” both later collected in Ebony and Crystal. In the “Notes and Announcements” section of the issue, Monroe described her contributors thus:

  Mr. George Sterling, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, is well known to

  American readers of poetry through his two books of verse, Wine of Wizardry and

  The House of Orchids.

  Mr. Clark Ashton Smith, also of California, is a youth whose talent has been

  acclaimed quite recently by a few newspapers of his own state, and recognized by one or two eastern publications. (99)

  The April 1913 issue contained a brief review of The Star-Treader in which Monroe found in the young poet “a rare spirit and the promise of poetic art,” although she qualified this by observing that it would be “idle to complain that his subjects are chiefly astronomic” and that “Life will bring him down to earth, no doubt, in her usual brusque manner” (31–32). This period of acceptance by the

  avant garde was, however, short-lived. Smith wrote to Sterling that “Miss Monroe of

  ‘Poetry’ has just returned a bunch of my late things with a gentle intimation that she doesn’t think much of ’em. What do you think of that editor and that magazine, by the way? ‘Poetry’ seems to be getting badder and badder, what with the Whit-manesque Hasidu in the last number” ( SU 92). Sterling’s response was “As to ‘Poetry,’ I agree with you that it keeps getting worse. Miss Monro [ sic] has been

  ‘infected’ by Ezra Pound, who is rabid for a ‘new form,’ and she is letting poetry go by the board. . . . If ‘Poetry’ were not subsidized, it would cease publication in a very few months, as it represents only a clique of no-poets now” (Sterling to CAS, 30 July 1913; SU 93).

  Despite the stated intention that all schools would be welcome in Poetry, by 1913 it was obvious that the magazine had been largely taken over by the followers of its London correspondent, Ezra Pound, who called themselves the Imagists. Al-

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  though Monroe would deny this, in a review of the anthology Some Imagist Poets she pointedly mentions that “the finest entries of its six poets . . . appeared in this magazine,” and notes that “It is pleasing to see so honorable a house as the great Boston firm [Houghton Mifflin] falling into line behind us” (150). Imagism was

  defined by two essays, by F. S. Flint and Pound, in the March 1913 issue. In the first, Flint admitted that the Imagists were contemporaries of the Post-Impressionists and the Futurists, but denied any common ground with these

  schools, and insisted that their work drew upon the best classical traditions of Sappho, Catullus, and François Villon. He listed three rules, which Pound went on at length to explain. These were:

  1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

  2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.

  3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not

  in sequence of a metronome. (Flint 199)

  Pound expounded upon these points, defining an “Image” as “that which pre-

  sents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (200). Elsewhere Pound would differentiate between an “Image” and a “Symbol,” holding that the

  latter was inferior because

  it fixes an existential value in a word and replaces a physical with an intellectual (or mystical) value; the Symbolist then proceeds . . . to circulate the substitution term as poetic currency. “The imagiste’s images,” on the other hand, “have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and c in algebra,” Pound said. The resilience of the image was its ability to resist capture by whatever rhetoric a greedy politician or an incompetent poet might dream up to exploit it. (Barbarese 288–89)

  Of course, the “semi-mystical doctrine of the symbol” was “at the centre of the aesthetic theory” of Romanticism, for “within it, a whole set of conflicts which were felt to be insoluble in ordinary life” became reconcilable (Eagleton 19).

  Although Smith has often been called a Romantic poet—sometimes even

  “The last of the great Romantic poets”—he at first resisted the label, feeling perhaps that he was called that more for what he wasn’t than for what he was. He wrote that “I don’t think much of Cale Young Rice’s classification of modern poets. I’m sick of classification, anyway. . . . He’d call me a ‘romanticist,’ I suppose.

  Well, at a pinch, I’d rather be called that than a ‘realist’” ( SL 49). He would later reluctantly accept the label, writing that it was not worth even submitting the manuscript for Ebony and Crystal to Henry Holt and Company “if [Robert] Frost is their [poetry] advisor. He would doubtless live up to his name, in respect to romantic poets like myself” (CAS to Sterling, 16 March 1922; SU 204).

  Unfortunately for Smith and Sterling, Pound’s attitude was representative of

  an emerging intellectual trend that disparaged Romanticism. Besides Pound and

  the Imagists, other critics of Romanticism included Pound’s protégé, T. S. Eliot;

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  one of Eliot’s Harvard professors, Irving Babbitt, who would later be a leader in the New Humanist movement; and the followers of F. R. Leavis and the English

  critical journal Scrutiny, who were also heavily influenced by Eliot’s thought. Eliot, perhaps influenced by Babbitt, identified Romanticism with “excess”:

  Romanticism stands for excess in any direction. It splits up into two directions: escape from the world of fact, and devotion to brute fact. The two great currents of the nineteenth-century—vague emotionalism and the apotheosis of science (realism)—alike spring from Rousseau. (Eliot, Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on Modern French Language, quoted in Rabate 217)

  In “The Function of Criticism,” Eliot further equated Romanticism with emo-

  tionalism and individualism. He looked back with approval on the time of the

  Metaphysical poets, such as John Donne, in whom Eliot perceived thought and

  emotion as existing hand in hand, while blaming on the Romantics a “disassocia-

  tion of sensibility” which separated thinking and feeling, leading to language being set adrift from experience. In his Harvard doctoral dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Eliot asserted that “experience comes to us most directly through sensations, which then become associated with feelings and are subsequently worked up into complex emotions. Poetry should affect the

  reader as directly as a physical sensation” (Materer 53). In “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot described how this should occur:

  The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (124–25)

  Thus for Eliot a test of how “authentic” a poem was involved “how vividly a

  poetic emotion seems to arise out of physical
sensations or images linked to these sensations” (Materer 53). Smith disputed the reliability of our sensory experiences, writing to H. P. Lovecraft that “the bare truth about the nature of things may be more fantastic than anything any of us have yet cooked up. . . . Five senses and three dimensions hardly scratch the hither surface of infinitude” ( SL 229). In a story unpublished in his lifetime, Smith wrote that

  The fact that all so-called sane and normal people, possessed of sight, hearing and the other senses, agreed substantially in their impressions of outward phenomena, might prove only the existence of common flaws or limitations in the sensory apparatus of the species. The thing called reality, perhaps, was merely a communal hallucination; and certainly, as science itself had tended to prove, man could lay claim to no finality of perception. ( SS 8)

  Another story, “A Star-Change,” dealt with the revelation of “the conditional nature

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  of our perception of reality” when he is transported to another world where his senses are altered by the inhabitants to withstand local conditions ( SL 128). Upon his return to his own world, he experiences the earth through his new senses and finds it unbearable. Smith’s most famous poem, The Hashish-Eater, dealt with what would happen “if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision

  . . . the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in the end” ( SL 366). Smith’s position was by no means unique; philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and

  Hume all had expressed similar reservations. Hugh Elliot is perhaps the best such example; in Modern Science and Materialism, he wrote: “Not only are our senses few, but they are extremely limited in their range” (quoted in Joshi 84). In a letter to the magazine Wonder Stories, Smith wrote: “it is partly because of this shifting, unstable ground on which the thing called realism stands, that I regard pure, frank fantasy as a more valid and lasting art-expression of the human mind” ( PD 21).