Max Eastman

“ Whether the reason lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance it has—the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden grain. ”

“ He seems, without losing that large grace of freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple people—the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect existence of a thing. ”

“ Poetry that has life for its subject, and democratic reality, is rather expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in admiration to Poe, and they were poets of reality, and those who touched the mood of democratic revolt. ”

“ They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with nature, were at play. And in Japan even today—surviving from that time—there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation. ”

“ Prose is the refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment—a thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.
Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman and sublime. ”

“ The awakener is science—empirical science turning its brave eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world has been saved—or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home is in these ages of sacred doubt. ”

“ Any one who has ever written love-letters—which are a kind of aboriginal [Pg 27] free-verse—knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. ”

“ And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural—a mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time, then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that belongs to the people. ”

“ We seek among all our experiences for some absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and eternal truth, but [Pg 98] nothing is eternally true except the variety of opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of ancient wisdom. ”

“ Poetry only naïvely acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not "ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called "rhythmical speech." ”

“ The "freedom" that it gives them is not a freedom to build rhythms that are impossible in prose, but a freedom from the necessity to build actual and continuous rhythms. Free verse avails itself of the rhythmic appearance of poetry, and it avoids the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so it will certainly live as a supremely convenient way to write, among those not too strongly appealed to by the greater convenience of not writing. ”

“ Persons who can read the rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. ”

“ But here again a cool and clear science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in its complexity, its subtle and refined dissimulation of the fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied, in the heart of all rhythmical experience. ”

“ And there is no doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of their interest. ”

“ Therefore one who moulds an object towards external perfection, however sad his solitude, enters directly into the "universal friendship" toward which Walt Whitman directed so much of the longing of his words. One who pours out phrases direct from his emotion may experience a relief and glory that implies listeners, and he may win listeners, but they will each rebuild out of his phrases their own different poem, and they will comprise in their number only those endowed with the special power to build poems out of phrases poured out. ”

“ The rebel egoism of democracy was in him the lordly and compelling thing, and though his love for the world was prodigious, it was not the kind of love that gives attention instinctively to the egoism of others. ”

“ And it will seem rather a fever in the light of universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an immortal reverence. ”

“ And while this fact may make the art of composition seem a little monotonous, it is better that art should be monotonous than that the world should. And it would be a monotonous world in which different people were so much alike, or we ourselves so much alike at different moments, that these minute filigrees of feeling should be altogether durable and capable of being served round in paper and ink. ”

“ He wanted his poetry to sound with nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner [Pg 32] heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more large with candor and directness. ”

“ A little group of isolated and exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain in itself intimations of otherness. ”

“ And whatever we may wish were true of the world, it is not true that the majority are so endowed. Therefore the poetry that is highly subjective is almost inevitably the poetry of a few; and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves a less clear and general social communion than the embodiment of emotion in an object of art. ”

“ There may be no grand passion for the idea, but there is a natural companionship with the fact of "democracy," in Poe's statement that he "kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable," and that statement more characteristically distinguishes his attitude from Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had of talking about beauty. All poets who mould their poems objectively, even though they may conceive themselves to be utterly alone with beauty, are really in social communion with humanity. ”

“ Sometimes for the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza, and once for the whole poem—"When I heard at the close of the day"—Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to all minds that are in tune. ”

“ Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection upon America or upon human nature, that Walt Whitman, with all his yearnings over the average American and his offering of priesthood and poetry to the people, should remain the poet of a rather esoteric few, whereas Poe—even with the handful of poems he wrote—may be said to be acceptable to the generality of men. ”

“ And that is what the reader of free verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into any great difficulty, he can make a full stop at the end of some line, and shift the gears of his rhythm altogether. And since it is possible for one who is rhythmically gifted to organize any indeterminate series of impressions whatever into an acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces a very enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to the author and, having made it himself, is not unable to admire. ”

“ There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of thought and feeling which exist for one individual alone, and for him once only. There are other values less delicate which he can reproduce in himself at will, but can not altogether communicate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings are too much their own. ”

“ An object, or as we say, a "thing," differs from other elements of our experience only in that it can be [Pg 25] experienced in the same form at different times and by different persons. And for an object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in itself, so that various perceivers may come from all sides and find it there. ”

“ But to whatever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration, or now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will come as a child, whose clear eyes and deliberate creative purposes are always appropriate and never to be apologized for, because they are the purposes of nature. ”

“ In the hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and get some more. ”

“ The step forward from them would not have been towards a greater sprawling and subjectifying of rhythmic and poetic character, but towards an increasing objective perfection which should still cling to the new and breathless thing, the presence of one who lives and speaks his heart naturally. ”

“ It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane passion of belief recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic opening of space for new and enormous growths of the old substance. ”

“ In that character it will mould and influence the literature of democracy, because it will mould and influence all literature in all lands.
"Who touches this book touches a man."
There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the tricks of literary sophistication. ”