by S. T. Joshi
Loveman’s multifarious artistic interests—particularly Greek antiquity, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, the Romantic poets (especially Keats and Shelley, but also lesser lights such as Thomas Dermody, John Clare, and Thomas Holley Chivers), and painting and sculpture of all periods—are triumphantly displayed in his poetry. There seem to have been few aesthetic stimuli to which Loveman did not respond in some fashion or other.
One of these stimuli, however, was the poetry of his own day—although Loveman would have argued (and did argue, although not always systematically or even coherently) that the poetry of such Modernists as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound was not in fact poetry at all, or at least not a fitting extension of the great heritage of Western poetry from the Greeks to the end of the nineteenth century. His screed “Modern Poetry (An Exorcism)” (Saturnian, March 1922) contains about as much vitriol as this gentle and sensitive soul seems to have had in him. It opens resoundingly:
We are told with something approaching portentous significance, that the new era in Poetry has dawned, and from the remotest gutterhole and sewer-trap in Greenwich Village, to the heroic skyline on Michigan Boulevard, vers-libre squalls and moans with the gusto of something newly-created, resolved to announce itself at the very outset as the one thing worth while and permanent in literature. . . . Emotion and beauty, the pity and the tragedy, the loneliness and oppression of life and humanity—are all to no purpose or concern in a movement that seems to have discovered itself originally within the chaste and holy precincts of a Parisian latrine, taken third-class passage on a freighter laden with hogs across the Atlantic, and brought its corporal and personal characteristics to the vicinities of Hester Street or Coney Island with a pomp and dignity not unbefitting mightier artistic influences.[111]
Shorn of exaggeration and polemic, this passage effectively skewers both the self-importance of the Modernists in their precipitate rejection of poetic tradition and suggests that Loveman’s own work will (as in fact it does) focus on “Emotion and beauty, the pity and the tragedy”—the basic, fundamental human emotions that have always been the foundation of great art. But there is also a certain snobbery or aesthetic class-consciousness (something we find in Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith also) in assuming that only certain objects or scenarios are fit subjects for the poet, and that those associated with the commonest features of everyday human life are somehow intrinsically unpoetical. The Modernists, of course, by their emphasis on “Parisian latrines” and suchlike, were merely reacting excessively to the deliberate avoidance of “low” subjects in the poetical period directly preceding theirs; and Loveman was too caught up in this new battle of ancients and moderns to take a more balanced view of the matter. We will find that, a decade or so later, he could himself find poetical inspiration in those features of human life that he would earlier have deemed beyond the pale of suitable aesthetic expression.
Loveman’s assessment of the prose work of his day was even more eccentric, and it is dismaying that, as late as 1932, in his review of Ludwig Lewisohn’s Expression in America, he can refer to William Faulkner as “a roaring and swashing tenth-rater” (L 215–16). He has little good to say of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, and Eugene O’Neill. In justice to Loveman, he was not alone in denying a place in the American canon to these authors, although by the 1930s he would have been in a distinct, and reactionary, minority in so doing. Loveman once made the peculiar remark that the four authors he valued most in American literature were George Sterling, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Saltus, and Sherwood Anderson[112]—so at least there was one Modernist who earned his approbation! But Loveman’s decade-long championing of Saltus—which included the writing of a full-length monograph (whether biographical or critical is not clear) that was never published and working with Saltus’s widow to secure the publication of some of his posthumous work—was a severe case of backing the wrong horse, for Saltus is now held in justifiably low esteem as the author of tinsel society novels.
Loveman would no doubt have been cut to the quick if he had known of his friend Hart Crane’s analysis of his artistic principles, as embodied in a 1924 letter to his mother:
. . . I see literature as very closely related to life,—its essence, in fact. But for Sam, all art is a refuge away from life,—and as long as he scorns or fears life (as he does) he is witheld [sic] from just so much of the deeper content and value of books, pictures and music. He sometimes talks about them in terms as naïve as an auctioneer would use. Yet he is instinctively so fine and generous that I will always love and pity him, however much my admiration is curtailed.[113]
There is, indeed, a kernel of truth to this: it would be difficult to deny that such a poem as “Lines” (1911) suggests a retreat into art as a shield from the pain and ugliness of life:
Give me to know the world as ’t is,
Bereft of joy and bitter-bare,
And leave me in my dreams but this,
The gift of beauty everywhere. (L 38)
But we will find that to leave it at this is to take an incomplete view of Loveman’s aesthetic purpose and, perhaps, of his character in general.
As it is, the evocation of the past—and, more particularly, a plangent sorrow at its inexorable passing—is at the heart of much of Loveman’s poetry, and it is what gives it much of its force and appeal. To Loveman, the past, specifically as embodied in Greco-Roman myth and legend, was a living reality, as the first stanza of “Ode to Ceres” (1911) demonstrates:
Sweet Mother, saffron-haired and argent-eyed,
That holdst four seasons in thy mellowing hand;
Foison and plenty on thy measur’d side,
Wisdom and warmth at thy uncurled command;
That with braced breath at dusky-veined eve,
Stirrest the furrow and the winnowing wain,
What time with fragrant finger thou let’st fall,
Soft-shining fron the pressure of thy sieve,
A dew ambrosial,
Bow thy dim head, withhold thy golden rain. (L 34)
It would be naïve to think that Loveman is somehow envisioning Ceres—the Roman goddess associated with the regenerative power of nature—as actually existing: instead, he has here found the rich tapestry of myths surrounding Ceres, as embodied in a multitude of ancient texts, a convenient springboard for a simultaneous expression of his devotion to the glories of the natural world and to the aesthetic experience of the past. This dual purpose is again evident in “Arcady” (1908):
Green shawes, and wheresoe’er ye go, glad light
Of many shining hills and singing seas,
Speed ye with smitten songs and bright-eyed mirth,
Sunlit with gold and roses garlanded;
And all the wide hills bear the distant din
Unto the silent mesh of field and flowerage,
To re-awake with silver pipe and reed,
Cephissus and his Echo fast asleep. (L 134)
But Loveman’s greatest paean to the past that is no more is of course The Hermaphrodite. No more gorgeous and poignant evocation of the passing of the classical world has ever been written in modern times:
I murmured: “For three thousand years
Is that tale done, yet bitter tears
Come to me now—to clasp and close
The delicate ecstasy of those
That vanished by no fault of mine.
Radiant, remote, these friends of thine,
So long ago! Another says
That in Pieria many days
The vintage through an autumn mist
Shone purple amid amethyst,
While in their vines one eve of gold
The tortured god walked as of old,
Bacchus, no doubt.” (L 46)
And yet, this poem is far more than merely a lament at the loss of pagan antiquity. What, indeed, is the Hermaphrodite? what is the symbolism behind his representation? Loveman seems to suggest that he is “The supreme loveliness that lies / In all
men’s souls, on all men’s eyes” (L 40)—perhaps because, in his fusion of male and female sexual characteristics, he represents the pinnacle of human beauty—but more broadly, the Hermaphrodite is the embodiment of the carefree, unmoral perception of, and absorption in, natural beauty that the Western world has lost because of its acceptance of Christianity. What has the advent of Jesus Christ, and his entire eschatology of sin and redemption, brought in its wake?
“But One there was,
Since thy long sleep had come to pass,
Who drove the antique fiery mirth
Forth from this mute and dreaming earth;
Who, crowned with thorns and soft as air,
Bade the Elysian world despair;
Hopeless and bitter, dusk and brief,
With great eyes brooding on his grief,
And vast heart burdened by such things,
Unknown to thy imaginings;—
He conjured Hell!” (L 50)
This is no mere religious polemic, even though, as early as 1915, in discussing “The Triumph of Anarchy” (later published as “A Triumph in Eternity”), he said that “I am nearly an atheist.”[114] What Loveman laments about the dominance of Christianity over paganism is the subordination of beauty to morality: the shadow of Hell hangs over the heads of all humanity, who will be consigned there for the slightest transgression of an inflexible and cheerless moral code. Is it any wonder that the Hermaphrodite speaks dismally of “these evil days, / When life’s a hideous thing at best, / And better rid!” (L 47)?
The conclusion of The Hermaphrodite supplies a hint of where the departure of “the glory that was Greece” will leave a bereft humanity: an unspecified figure addresses the Hermaphrodite as follows:
“‘Close, marble lids, on gentian eyes,
Wiser than those that made thee wise;
Beauty takes back a dream to her,
Fragile and shining, pale and proud,
Beyond the vigil of the crowd,
To the utmost, endless, inset shrine
Where all things are, and all divine.’”
He paused, he smiled, he faced the night
And faded, the Hermaphrodite. (L 55)
What can this mean? Is Loveman suggesting that beauty is withdrawing from a humanity that no longer appreciates her and is no longer worthy of her? The Hermaphrodite’s fading into the night signals not merely the departure of a single object of beauty, but the departure of an entire universe of loveliness that the Christian world-view renders suspect and, in a fashion, satanic.
Loveman appears to continue his critique of Christianity in “A Triumph in Eternity” (written 1916, published 1921): I say “appears,” because the overall thrust and message of that poem are by no means clear. Even so sympathetic reader as Clark Ashton Smith, reading the first draft, remarked: “I like your ‘Triumph of Anarchy,’ tho there are parts of it that I fail to ‘get.’”[115] Here again the contrast between the pagan and the Christian worldview seems to be the focus, in its depiction of the emergence of the ancient Greek heroes—Oedipus, Agamemnon, Tiresias, and others—and, at the same time, of Jesus, apparently in doubt as to the value or ultimate success of his mission on earth (“For in his eyes the light of faith was gone, / And in his heart had hope long perished” [L 102]). The poem was incendiary enough to have stirred the amateur critic Michael Oscar White to declare that “In anyone but an amateur poet with an amateur perception of things held sacred in a Christian country the whole piece would be considered blasphemous” (see L 20), thereby stirring up an amusing tempest in a teapot in which Loveman’s partisans—including Lovecraft, Alfred Galpin, and Frank Belknap Long—systematically heaped ridicule upon White for his dogmatism and insensitivity to beauty. But the poem remains more than a little opaque.
A bit clearer is “To Satan,” which Lovecraft was proud to publish in the July 1923 issue of his Conservative, although it had been written some years before. In this poem Satan is depicted as striving, like Prometheus, to bestow liberty upon a human race oppressed with a tyrannical God and his dictates—
With the first cry that shook th’ enslaved world,
Swift, silver, clarion, Lo! I make you free,
Free as the winds and as the waters are,
Sons of the morning-star!
O souls of mine, I give you liberty—
No withering hate into the darkness hurl’d! (L 109)
This poem, curiously, bears an indirect relation to an undated poem that Loveman apparently did not publish in his lifetime—“Debs in Prison.” This poem, probably written in the late 1910s, is addressed to Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926), the Socialist leader who was imprisoned in 1917–19 under the Espionage Act in what was widely regarded as a miscarriage of justice and an infringement upon free speech. Loveman, who was no doubt aware of Debs’s rallying cry during his several presidential campaigns—“While there is a soul in prison, I am not free”—sees Debs as the latest in a long line of figures (including, interestingly, Jesus Christ) who experienced the pain we all should feel at the sight of human suffering. Its final stanza is powerful and moving:
Until the brotherhood of man is come,
And all that wrong is righted for the weak;
Until those mouths by tyranny made dumb,
Give utterance to the word they fain would speak;
Until with healing and with human wings,
By reed and trumpet blown beyond their power,
Love everlasting, hearkens to our ken,
Until your voice, O Liberty, proclaims that hour—
Ransom and light for your divinest things!
I stay imprisoned with my fellow-men. (L 118–19)
Loveman is rarely as explicitly political as this: his customary attitude of retreating from life into art forbade many such discussions of public affairs. But what we find in his later verse is a fusion of the inspiration gained from art and that gained from life; in some cases, indeed, the latter is sufficient to carry a poem. His frequent addresses to friends and colleagues are numerous and heartfelt: consider “A Letter to G——K——” and “To George Kirk on His 27th Birthday” (tributes to the bookseller and Kalem Club member); “Ernest Nelson” (a poignant elegy to a deceased member of Hart Crane’s circle); “To Mr. Theobald” (an affecting poem on Lovecraft’s return to Providence in 1926); and numerous others. “W. E.” and “Memoralia” are touching remembrances of army buddies at Camp Gordon, Georgia, where Loveman was stationed in 1918–19. The last stanza of the latter can only be quoted:
For phantom are the eyes that shine,
Hands I would clasp, souls I would keep;
Yet this immortal hour is mine,
That takes them from eternal sleep. (L 69)
Poems such as these make one understand why Loveman, with his generally melancholy and sensitive temperament, could write as he did to Clark Ashton Smith: “Outside of poetry and friendship—what is there, pray?—love, which is a disease—and Life which (as the Buddhists say) is evil.”[116]
But it is in Loveman’s later verse that we see him fully coming to terms with “life” and drawing his inspiration from it—chiefly from the natural world—without in any sense departing from his devotion to art; for it is art that can lend deeper meanings to life, which might otherwise seem merely a random sucession of incoherent vistas and events. “River Pattern” (1932) finds wonder in the ever-changing Mississippi River; “Madison Square” (1935), in two brief stanzas, captures the atmosphere of a New York park; the even briefer “Dream of Spring” (1936) delicately encapsulates the passing of the seasons. In the end, however, Loveman returned to art—not as a bulwark against “reality,” but as the one anchor in a world whose transience and insignificance could only be combated by the refuge of beauty. But even art can be fleeting and ephemeral:
A wind in the jade-green grasses
That shivers and passes;
The swallows that, nesting, call
In the almond-blossom’s fall—
I k
now their passionate cry
As they vanish to die. (L 82)
If The Hermaphrodite were excepted, a case could be made that Loveman’s verse dramas are, on the whole, superior to his poems; at any rate, they form a significant adjunct to his art, allowing him a wider range of poetical expression than he generally chose to employ in his lyric poems.[117] In this body of work, the inspiration of art is paramount: Loveman developed an uncanny skill in presenting ingenious supplements to some of the great monuments of poetic drama of the past. Here three items are in evidence: “Oedipus at Colonus” (1911), “A Scene for King Lear” (1917), and “A Scene for Macbeth” (1920).
“Oedipus at Colonus” purports to be a kind of appendage or coda to Sophocles’ great play. In Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles depicts Oedipus learning the awful truth of his marriage to his mother, Jocasta; she kills herself and he blinds himself with her brooch. In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus, banished from Thebes and wandering through Attica accompanied by his daughter Antigone, comes to Colonus, where it is foretold he will die. He hears of the quarrel between his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, for the throne of Thebes, and angrily curses them, vowing that they should die by each other’s hands. A messenger then reports his death, with only Theseus in his company.
Loveman departs significantly from this concluding scenario in depicting Oedipus’ death. His “Oedipus at Colonus” plangently shows Oedipus and Antigone lamenting when hearing of the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices; and before his own death he speaks movingly of his doomed sons:
Soft, soft!
The little children call me from the dark,
Eteocles and Polynices—sons all,
I held them dandled at my naked knee,
And suck fond kisses from their cherub lips,
But none of them would come, none to help bear,
My whole world’s weight of leaden misery. (L 124)
It is no accident that “Oedipus at Colonus” sounds more like a missing segment of an Elizabethan tragedy than of an ancient Greek one, for Loveman seemed uncannily in tune with the Elizabethans in both diction and sentiment. This feature of his work comes out most strongly in his additions to King Lear and Macbeth. Here again, Loveman chose to depict climactic scenes that in Shakespeare were prudently kept off stage—specifically, the deaths of Cordelia and of Lady Macbeth. “A Scene for King Lear” is presumably to be inserted into the middle of scene 3 of Act 5, at which point Lear and his daughter Cordelia have been imprisoned by Edmund, who orders that Cordelia be hanged. In Shakespeare there is nothing intervening between Edmund’s order (“He hath commission from thy wife and me / To hang Cordelia in the prison . . .”: 5.3.253-54) and Lear’s entrance with the dead Cordelia in his arms. Loveman attempts to envision the scene in the prison where Cordelia meets her death. Mingling prose and verse in good Shakespearean fashion, Loveman grippingly depicts Lear pleading for his daughter’s life to the heartless captain who will kill her:
