Baltimore Evening Sun (1 July 1911): 6.
Let us now turn aside from the great problems of sociology and political economy and consider, for a short space, the sweet bellowing of minnesingers. The poets of our fair laud are always at it; not national campaigns nor baseball nor the high cost of living nor even the weather can still their music. Materialists we may be and hard chasers of the dollar, but all the same we print more books of poetry every year than any other two nations taken together. Here, with July upon us, are six in a row—two green ones, a brown one, a purple one and two whites. The fattest has 169 pages and the thinnest just 100 less. Altogether there are 596 pages of honest, earnest, hopeful poetics.
Let Edward Smyth Jones have the first hearing. The Hon. Mr. Jones, it appears, is a gentleman of color. At all events, he is introduced in a guarded preface by the Hon. William Stanley Braithwaite, the eminent Afro-American critic, of Boston, Mass., and many of his strophes have the ardent quality of the Jubilee Songs. Not religion, however, but art, aspiration and amour are his themes. One of his best efforts, for example, is an ode inspired by hearing a vocalist of color, Miss Lulu E. Johnson, sing an “Ave Maria” from the choir-loft of “Quinn Chapel, Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church, Ninth and Walnut streets, Louisville, Ky., Wednesday evening, October 16, 1907.” Thus the tuneful Jones:
Ere you throw the sods upon me, on my
never-beating breast,
While my body’s lying silent find my soul
is seeking rest—
Then I’ll wing straight home to glory, for
the journey won’t be long,
On the spirit-wafting music of sweet Lulu
Johnson’s song!
One small gem, dredged up from the poet’s bubbling mill-race of song, must suffice to show him in another mood:
Greeks once sang a lovely song
To their maiden Cora;
But my lay floats soft along
To my Dainty Dora.
Frenchmen sing of Anne Belle
Romans sing of Flora;
But I sing my song to tell
Of my Dainty Dora.
Laugh not at Edward Smyth Jones! His poetry, perhaps, is atrocious, but a couple of autobiographical notes in his book show what a tough business he has found life to be, and how hard and manfully he has struggled to lift himself up.
Among the Caucasian poets of our little company Robert Valentine Heckscher must stand first, if only for this excellent lyric:
I wish thee many woes, my Love,
I wish thee many woes—
How sweet to crush the cruel thorns
Around my blushing rose!
I wish thee tattered weeds, my Sweet—
A barefoot maid, to glean—
I’d heap thine arms with golden wheat,
Bind sandals to thy rosy feet,
And robe thee as a queen, my Sweet,
And robe thee as a queen!
Unfortunately, Mr. Heckscher is but seldom in this natural, buoyant mood. Too often he manufactures empty balderdash of a pious cast, with very little poetry in it. In a somewhat pompous preface he explains his æsthetic theory. “I have felt,” he says, “that whatever is true to Heaven, the Ideal State or the Truth—whatever is thus Good—will be Beautiful, it being an Appearance, Illustration or Expression of that Eternal Truth.” A sonorous remark, but one not noticeably freighted with sense.
Another pietist is Eugene B Read, who frankly labels his compositions “Devotional Poems for the Quiet Hour.” Renunciation is the burden of his song; he warns against the snares of the world; the only safe life, he opines, is that given over to soul-searching and self- accusation. He is ever bewailing the “foul disgrace” of a “sinful race”: his prayer is to be weaned “from the love of earth”, to be set free from “the love of sin within” and “the show of sin without”. Such gloomy stuff belongs to theology rather than to poetry: it is rather difficult to get any beauty into a confession of guilt. An example:
Father, whene’er at eventide
I backward look upon the day,
And see how selfishness and pride
And worldliness has (sic) marred the way,
What can I do but look to Thee
With sincere penitence, and say,
Oh, Lord, forgive disloyalty,
And help me both to watch and pray.
Not many of Mr. Read’s lugubrious stanzas, I fear, will get into the hymnals. The Puritan conception of the church, as a sort of moral morgue and wailing-place, is fast giving way to more humane notions.
T. B. Shartle, whose “Rhymes of the City of Roses” appear in a slim book marked “Vol. I,” is an earnest, honest poetaster of the country weekly school. A few strophes grabbed at random:
Alone in the midst of a solitude sombre and
still,
A hunter died in a wild Alaskan hill,
But ere expired the hunter’s final breath
He wrote a note that told the cause of
death.
Upon a hill his lifeless body was found.
A desperate struggle marked the mellow
ground;
Upon that hunter rushed a wounded bear
With no intent his human foe to spare.
Some day, perhaps, a beneficent Congress will prohibit the printing of such flapdoodle, on penalty of the bastinado. Meanwhile we must suffer it.
Finally come Constantine Marrast Perkins and Anne Cleveland Cheney, the former with a long and fluent poem about nothing in particular and the latter with a collection of pallid things in the Atlantic Monthly style. Here, for example, is part of an ode to Niagara:
With mighty rhythm and roar
On, on!
Willows along the shore
Grow wan,
Leaning and listening to the saga thou
singest—
Eternally singest, great Scald of Nature!
Low, ceaseless beat
Like ghostly hordes of moccasined feet;
Strong forces of joy and of life
Forever calling,
Rising and falling
Over death, over strife;
Now dirgeful and deep,
Now the movement of dances,
Wild, primeval, entrances
With a strange surge and sweep.
And so on and so on and so on. No doubt such an idle piling up of words passes for poetry with certain persons, but the majority of readers will find it soporific. Miss Cheney, in brief, has an extremely slender stock of ideas, which explains, no doubt, the eagerness with which her harmless compositions are welcomed by the magazines.
A line or two at the end for Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” which has been separated from “Rewards and Fairies” and printed in a little bound book. It is worth exactly a line or two, and that line or two having been given to it no more need be said.
H. L. Mencken