The Poets' Corner

by John Lithgow

  When Coleridge developed a debilitating addiction to opium, his work declined and his relationship with Wordsworth grew strained. He went off to travel and lecture, spending the last years of his life bunking with a physician friend, worn out by marital problems, debt, illness, and addiction.

  Coming to the end of life in less than triumphant circumstances isn’t unusual for poets and writers and artists of all stripes. Many seem to burn through years on the fumes of their own curiosity and creativity, some of them creating their finest work in the most difficult times of their lives, others succumbing to the furies of the lives they led. I think Coleridge probably falls somewhere in the middle. He wrote his best poems early on in his career, but late in life also turned out Biographia Literaria, a volume of literary criticism that is considered one of his most valuable contributions to the Romantic dialogue, especially on the subject of imagination. I think Coleridge is the most revolutionary and inspiring to the creative mind in those essays.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epitaph reads:

  Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,

  And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod

  A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he.

  O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;

  That he who many a year with toil of breath

  Found death in life, may here find life in death!

  Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame

  He ask’d, and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same!

  Kubla Khan

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  So twice five miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round:

  And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

  Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

  And here were forests ancient as the hills,

  Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

  And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

  As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

  A mighty fountain momently was forced:

  Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

  Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

  Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

  And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

  It flung up momently the sacred river.

  Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

  Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

  Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

  And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

  And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  The shadow of the dome of pleasure

  Floated midway on the waves;

  Where was heard the mingled measure

  From the fountain and the caves.

  It was a miracle of rare device,

  A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

  A damsel with a dulcimer

  In a vision once I saw:

  It was an Abyssinian maid,

  And on her dulcimer she played,

  Singing of Mount Abora.

  Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song,

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

  That with music loud and long,

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  And all who heard should see them there,

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  The story goes that Coleridge published “Kubla Khan” at the request of fellow poet Lord Byron, who had heard him recite it aloud and found it mesmerizing. With it, Coleridge published a note explaining that he’d written the poem after a deep sleep, in which he had dreamed it in fantastic, vivid detail. After he awoke, with a clear vision and perfect memory of the dream, he wrote down the words of the poem. He also suggested that he’d been interrupted in this effort by a visitor from the village of Porlock in southwestern England, and when he returned to his writing, he was unable to remember the details of the rest of his dream. So “Kubla Khan” is a “fragment” of a poem, according to Coleridge, but, oh, what a fragment!

  Favorite Poems

  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” “Christabel”

  “Frost at Midnight” “The Nightingale” “Fears in Solitude”

  “Dejection: An Ode”

  This poem is considered one of Coleridge’s “mystery poems,” so described by critics for its otherworldly imagery and language, and for the puzzling, mysterious nature of the poem itself. I think of it as a hallucination in which the poet finds himself the narrator and a character.

  There really was a Kubla Khan who built himself a Xanadu in China. The poet tells this story in careful detail, describing the folly of a man deluding himself, pursuing a path of impossible immortality. Then the poem splits in half and the poet turns himself into Kubla Khan, a terrifying figure who has tasted magic and would do anything to taste it again. Kubla Khan (and the poet) are doomed; no matter what humans do to isolate themselves from age or mortality, war or danger, these things will come. No fortress of Paradise can protect from that eventuality,

  This poem may reveal a cold, hard truth, but I’m still crazy about the language. This is Coleridge the imagineer at his finest, describing a “savage place” with “caverns measureless to man,” a “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.” You know he’s never actually seen these places but he enlists his imagination to give brilliantly detailed shape to this story he has to tell. Where Wordsworth and company deferred to reason and common language, Coleridge fired up his imagination and used “the best words in the best order,” no matter how uncommon they might be. “His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” is certainly an image from a dream, but there are no better words, in Coleridge’s mind, to convey the terror and the truth of Kubla Khan.

  Coleridge, who was a wonderful reader of his own work, would entrance an audience with a deep-toned, droning reading of this poem that would send chills down the spine. Said his lifelong friend Charles Lamb, “His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an archangel a little damaged.”

  A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Hart Crane

  The Lost Optimist

  (1899–1932)

  In the summer of 1924, a friend told Hart Crane about an apartment that was available at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn. Crane moved in and began writing poetry from his room above the harbor. As he worked at a table underneath the flat’s rear window, he could see Gothic arches and formidable steel cables soaring across the East River. This is how Hart Crane met the Brooklyn Bridge. He wrote to his friend, “I am living in the shadow of that bridge. There is all the glorious dance of the river directly beyond the back window . . . the ships, the harbor, the skyline of Manhattan . . . it is everything from mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh.”

  Crane was a high school dropout from Ohio, the son of the successful candy wizard who invented Life Savers. When he came to the big city to make a l
ife for himself, he dropped his first name, Harold, in favor of Hart, his mother’s maiden name. Crane was perpetually broke, but in the most glamorous sense of the word—he stomped around his crumbling apartment playing the same jazz record over and over on his old Victrola; he lived on small grants, bits of prize money, and fellowships; he crashed at the houses of cosmopolitan friends like the playwright Eugene O’Neill and the photographer Walker Evans; and he was photographed by Man Ray for Vanity Fair magazine.

  His first poem, “C-33,” was published in an experimental magazine, Bruno’s Weekly, when he was just seventeen. Crane devoured Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Laforgue, but he also loved Webster, Donne, and Marlowe (“dear olde Kit,” as Crane called him). It was this eclectic collection of influences that brought out Crane’s style, which mixed modern images with dashing Elizabethan language. He skipped through the halls of Elizabethan poetry, picking and plundering what he liked best. His first volume of poetry, White Buildings, was published in 1926. The Bridge (1930), his epic poem, won the annual Poetry award in 1930. E.E. Cummings called him a “born poet.”

  Crane was a card-carrying member of the Lost Generation—those beautiful and tragic souls who haunted Paris and New York in the 1920s. But he was also brightly optimistic about the modern world. In so many of his poems, he considered the city, his times, and impressions from incidents in his own life. He wanted his epic poem, The Bridge, of which “To Brooklyn Bridge” was a part, to portray a “mystic synthesis of America.” He embraced the modern city—he didn’t see it as some kind of failure or symbol of a grim future. He contemplated urban space—subways, tunnels, bridges, cityscapes—in a way no other has written of it before or since.

  Favorite Poems

  “The Broken Tower” “At Melville’s Tomb” “Voyages” I–VI

  “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” “The River”

  To Brooklyn Bridge

  How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

  The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

  Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

  Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

  Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

  As apparitional as sails that cross

  Some page of figures to be filed away;

  —Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

  I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

  With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

  Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

  Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

  And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced

  As though the sun took step of thee, yet left

  Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—

  Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

  Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

  A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

  Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

  A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

  Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

  A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;

  All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .

  Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

  And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,

  Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow

  Of anonymity time cannot raise:

  Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

  O harp and altar, of the fury fused,

  (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

  Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,

  Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—

  Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

  Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

  Beading thy path—condense eternity:

  And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

  Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

  Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

  The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

  Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

  O Sleepless as the river under thee,

  Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

  Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

  And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

  From a report by engineer John A. Roebling to the New York Bridge Company on September 1, 1867:

  The contemplated work, when constructed in accordance with my design, will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the great engineering work of the Continent and of the age. Its most conspicuous feature—the great towers—will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, and a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering, the structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise, and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection.

  Besides being a tremendous portrait of a bridge, I think this poem has all the clamor of a city. The elements—a river, the night, city shapes and sights—come into focus, as soft as a dream and as spare and metallic as a nightmare. Tough, breathless, dangerous imagery contrasts with a delicate strength of almost godlike proportion. Crane paints a word picture of a huge, powerful, looming object that happens to be beautiful. The poem reminds me a lot of the early-twentieth-century Ashcan School of painting, a group of artists in New York City who portrayed urban street life in a gritty, unromanticized style.

  Crane addresses the Brooklyn Bridge as “thee,” in a nod to Elizabethan sonnets. He uses unexpected phrases—“elevators drop us from our day,” “noon leaks” onto the street. He mixes his impressive intellect with the earnest heart of a boy from Ohio. Underneath his difficult constructions and words like “acetylene” and “guerdon” (a colorless, highly explosive gas, and a reward, respectively), it’s not hard to see the yearnings and wonder of a small-town kid.

  Crane’s hopeful poems did not always match up with the tenor of his life. He hurled his typewriter out of his apartment window during more than one bout of writer’s block. He was incredibly hard on himself, ignoring the praise that The Bridge won and drinking heavily. The Mexican painter David Siqueiros painted a portrait of Crane showing the poet looking down—it seems that when Crane looked directly up, there was too much pain in his eyes.

  Crane won a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to Mexico in 1931 to work on an epic about the conquistadors. When his grant was up, however, he only had a handful of poems. He boarded the SS Orizaba in April of 1932, but he never made it back to New York. Crane jumped from the steamship to his death, in an echo of words he once wrote: “This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.”

  Chaplinesque

  We will make our meek adjustments,

  Contented with such random consolations

  As the wind deposits

  In slithered and too ample pockets.

  For we can still love the world, who find

  A famished kitten on the step, and know

  Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

  Or warm torn elbow coverts.

  We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

  Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

  That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

  Facing the dull squint with what innocence

  And what surprise!

  And yet these fine collapses are not lies

  More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

  Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

  We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

  What blame to us if the heart live on.

  The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

  The moon in lonely alleys make

  A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

  And through all sound of gaiety and quest

  Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

  E. E. Cummings

  The Rule
-Breaker

  (1894–1962)

  Many years ago, a friend gave me a worn paperback collection of E. E. Cummings’s poems with the inscription, “Read all of these in spring.” There is no other season that reminds me more strongly of Cummings: reading his poems is like opening a window and breathing in the spring air after a long, stuffy winter.

  E. E. Cummings took all the customs of poetry and the conventions of proper English and turned them on their head. He created his own rules for titles, punctuation, form, and grammar, and not for a lack of education: Cummings grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard, where he was an extraordinary student but rebelled against its conservative, academic atmosphere. His fascination with modern art, impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism, and futurism inspired a poetry style all his own, a kind of written cubism in which he chops up lines and carefully arranges words and phrases on the page. Cummings’s playfulness and lyricism make words shine. When reading his poems, it is easy to skip from line to line like stones on the bed of a stream, hopping from one to the next.

  if everything happens that can’t be done

  if everything happens that can’t be done

  (and anything’s righter

  than books

  could plan)

  the stupidest teacher will almost guess

  (with a run

  skip

  around we go yes)

  there’s nothing as something as one

  one hasn’t a why or because or although

  (and buds know better

  than books

  don’t grow)

  one’s anything old being everything new

  (with a what

  which

  around we come who)

  one’s everyanything so

  so world is a leaf so tree is a bough

  (and birds sing sweeter

  than books

  tell how)