Cather enacts the Eleusinian Mysteries, maybe

I waved, yesterday, at Willa Cather’s use of classical literature, of Ovid and Virgil, but she has another way of using mythology in her fiction, building major episodes of My Ántonia on the anthropological approach to myth.  Not the intellectual literary Greek mythology of Ovid, but the real thing, Greek religion, to the extent that scholars understood it.  William Faulkner, when he decided to write a thriller, structured it around The Golden Bough, but Cather had a more serious intellectual interest in the subject, unless she also just read The Golden Bough.  I doubt that is what I am saying.

Regardless, My Ántonia has quite a lot of this sort of thing.  It has a scene involving a human sacrifice to the corn god, for example.  That’s in II.vi, where a tramp falls or throws himself into a thresher.  The last twenty pages or so of the novel contain a reunion between the narrator and Ántonia, who is married with twelve children, as literal an earth-mother figure as Cather can make her.  The long, complex scene appears to be packed with references to – no, appears to be re-enacting – the Eleusinian Mysteries.  The bit where Jim descends into a cave, and is shown its mysterious treasures by the priestesses – I mean, c’mon.  The treasures in this case are things like spiced plum preserves.

Maybe not.  But it’s right there in front of my eyes.  I don’t see the like in The Professor’s House, and A Lost Lady only gave me frustrating hints of something else going on behind the scenes.  My Ántonia at least has more clues.  Because the form is nominally a memoir, told at some distance in time, the “plot” is episodic  and even random.  Here are the odd things that happened in my town while I was growing up, the (rare) murders and (somewhat less rare) suicides and the time the dying Russian told that crazy story about throwing a bride to the wolves and the time the blind pianist came to town.  There is some ordinary life, too, but plenty of extraordinary events.  The extraordinary events are often bizarre or grotesque, and they often have associations with more archetypal mythical stories.

The “Negro pianist,” Blind d’Arnault, “looked like some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” (II.vii).  Dionysus is Asian, right, but d’Arnault is a Dionysian figure, a strange magical musician.  Or maybe he is Orpheus.  He gets the girls, Ántonia and her friends, dancing.  If they are Bacchantes, at least they do not tear anyone to pieces.  His music apparently also summons a group of Italian dancing masters, who set up their tent in the next chapter, where girls in white dresses dance to the harp and flute, overseen by an Italian woman in lavender who “wore her hair on the top of her head, built up in a black tower, with red coral combs.”

Again, what do I know, but that is a lot of Mediterranean detail for the Nebraska prairie.  So I have suspicions.

The pianist is likely a composite of a number of touring blind African-American pianists of the 19th century, but for some reason that I do not understand Cather and her narrator interrupt the scene with a long description of his childhood and how an enslaved boy became a piano prodigy.  The biography is specifically that of Blind Tom Wiggins, the subject of a superb recent novel, Song of the Shank (2014), by Jeffery Renard Allen.  I suppose Allen is interweaving Cather into whatever he is doing with the story.

To what degree – whether – any of this is part of the meaning of My Ántonia, whatever that might be, and to what degree it is a separate layer, content to be invisible to most readers, is a puzzle.

Willa Cather brings the Muse to her country - her use of Classical myth

Several years ago I wrote something about Willa Cather’s use of mythology, about how incidents in her novel made specific but subtle references to classical stories.  What is going on in those comments?  Cather loved Classical literature and mythology and somehow figured out how to mix it into the regional fiction that she was at first reluctant to write.  She discovered she could Write What She Knew in more than one way, and include the things she knew and loved (Ovid, Virgil) and the things about which she was more ambivalent (Nebraska).

It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those [the Danish and Bohemian servants] and the poetry of Virgil.  If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.  I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious.  I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.  (My Ántonia, III.ii)

Jim Burden is now a college student at the University of Nebraska, escaping Red Cloud – sorry, Black Hawk – for good.  Like the actual Willa Cather, he has become a diligent student of Greek and Latin literature.  As Cather does with his fiction, I suspect he packs his fiction with references to myths.

In I.vii., young Jim, in the presence of the admiring Ántonia, slays a dragon, or Nebraska’s equivalent, a huge rattlesnake.  Is this a generic dragon-slaying adventure, mythical enough, or something more specific?  Apollo slaying Python?  And if so, which version?  Or is this one of the snakes in Virgil’s Georgics, his long poem about farming.  Where Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a guiding poem of O Pioneers!, the Georgics may (or may not) diffuse through My Ántonia:

…[Virgil’s] mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, “I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.” (III.ii)

That could be Cather’s own manifesto.  At some point I had the suspicion, or fear, that Cather was working her way through Georgics, episode by episode, but now I don’t think that is true.  But I do not know Georgics that well.

A Lost Lady is governed by Ovid rather than Virgil.  “He read the Heroides over and over, and felt that they were the most glowing love stories ever told” (I.vii).  Cather specifically tells me what I ought to be reading!  I am pretty sure that I need the Phaedra letter (the young man is Hippolytus, the lost lady Phaedra, the retired railroad man Theseus), but I will bet that there is even more to it.

This, gesturing vaguely, is there, but how much and exactly where, good question.  Most readers, I think, do not care at all.  I think they are – I am – missing something.  Maybe someday I will do the requisite work.

Willa Cather write what she knows - you don’t see them quite enough from the outside

Willa Cather had published a book of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), a major theme of which is the hostility of her native Midwest to artists.  She was having trouble moving forward as a writer.  My understanding is that her friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett helped her change.  “I want you to be surer of your backgrounds,” Jewett wrote in a 1908letter, meaning her Nebraska childhood, and for that matter her life in New York writing for a magazine.  Jewett is giving the “write what you know” advice, but with more depth.  “These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them quite enough from the outside…”

Cather found a couple of ways to embrace her subject yet be outside of her material.  In a 1921 interview feature, Cather says: “[Jewett] said to me that if my life had lain in a part of the world that was without a literature, and I couldn't tell about it truthfully in the form I most admired, I'd have to make a kind of writing that would tell it, no matter what I lost in the process.”

That last phrase is interesting.  What did she lose, I wonder?  “A painter or writer must learn to distinguish what is his own from that which he admires.”  She gives up what she admires to find what is her own.

So, two ways to keep her distance.  One is to use frames heavily, a story-within-a-story structure like in The Professor’s House or distancing narrators as in A Lost Lady and My Ántonia.  Both are novels about idealized women, the wealthy wife of a retired railroad magnate in the former and a group of immigrant servants in the latter, but with the stories witnessed or told by the young men who have idealized them.  Lots of ways for the character not to be Cather, when he shares her memories. 

The “Introduction” to My Ántonia is an almost comical denial that the book is written by Cather. No, this is by her friend Jim Burden, who started out writing a few memories of one particular “Bohemian girl” and somehow wrote an entire memoir.  “My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.”  Cather never writes anything except the Introduction, yet it is her name on the cover!  These writers, what thieves.

Of course we all know that the existence of the frame changes the “aboutness” of the story, too, that it is also “about” the narrator or observer, maybe even largely about the narrator.

We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.  It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.  (Introduction)

There is that new form, that new kind of writing, I guess, one that can do two things at once, or three, or more.

I’ll try one more of those things tomorrow, although or because I do not understand it well.  Let’s look at classical Cather.

The Professor's House, Willa Cather's exploration adventure novel

I’m going to do this backwards, writing about The Professor’s House (1925), which is not a prairie novel, first and then go back to A Lost Lady and so on.

Do you remember the fun we all had, way back in 2012, with the MLA International Bibliography and its possible uses as a way to measure the academic reputation of books and authors?  If I put in “American Literature” right now, I see that Willa Cather ranks #17 with 2,384 papers, books, etcs. tagged with her name since the beginning of the database in 1946.  Faulkner, James and Melville blow everyone else away, but #17 is high.  There is also a list of the top individual works – I can only see the top 50 – and two of them are Cather’s, My Ántonia, obviously, and The Professor’s House.  Were you expecting The Professor’s House to be the second-most studied work of Cather’s?  I was not.

The novel is short, 170 pages in the Library of America volume, and is even shorter than it looks.  The first hundred pages are about Professor St. Peter and his family.  They live in a city that may have a shadowy coexistence with Milwaukee.  The professor has just completed a life’s work, a multi-volume history of the Spanish in the American Southwest, something along the lines of Francis Parkman’s seven volume France and England in North America (1865-92).  He is casting about for a purpose.  One task is to edit a journal left to him by his best student, Tom Outland, who was killed in the war and also by chance made the professor’s family enormously rich with a patent for a mysterious gas.  There is some soap opera stuff there that I did not enjoy much.

That’s right, Tom Outland.  His journal is about that time he discovered the Anasazi ruins now known as Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, one of America’s great treasures.  What, lots of important explorers have names like Tom Outland.

I thought the journal was terrific.  It was a completely convincing piece of writing of its type, worthy of company with Hiram Bingham’s Inca Land (1922), about Bingham’s accidental discovery of Machu Picchu, or say John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).  Of course this text is a fiction, a few actual events mixed with invention.  It is an alternate-world discovery of an alternate-world ruin.

I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow.  Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep.  It was as still as sculpture – and something like that.  It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of one another, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.  (II.iii)

That tower is the iconic symbol of Mesa Verde.  The glimpse of it through the snow by a cattleman looking for strays, Cather borrowed that from the true story.  But even here she aestheticizes the incident in her own way.

Just for the subject matter, the inset novella is intensely interesting.  Then, for seventeen pages, it is back to Professor St. Peter – these symbolic names! – and his problems.  Then The Professor’s House is over.  One major critical issue with the novel is how or frankly whether the pieces mesh in any but the crudest way.  But the novella, the discovery, that was thrilling.  And not in any way about the Great Plains.

it was still, all day long, Nebraska - Willa Cather is too close to home

For a long time I had a regional aversion to reading Willa Cather, and now that I have read five of her books I am not sure that I have shed it.  Does anybody else suffer from this malady?  As a readerly youth, I wanted to read about There, any There, not Here, and Red Cloud, Nebraska, was very much Here.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.  (My Ántonia, I.i)

The narrator is seeing Nebraska from the train.  Accurately said, narrator of My Ántonia.

I grew up about an hour and a half from Red Cloud, the setting, as fictional settings go, of O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), although I did not visit it until a couple of years ago.  Besides Cather’s childhood home, the sights in Red Cloud are pretty much all centered on My Ántonia, which partly takes place in town, while O Pioneers! is entirely out in the countryside, and sod houses do not survive too long.

Red Cloud is easily worth visiting if you happen to be in the area, which you will not be, because there is nothing in the area.  It is not “in the area” of anything.  Except where I grew up.

Our guide, who was great, told me that Cather scholars have their convention in Red Cloud every other year, and all I could think was “Oh no.  Do not become a Cather scholar.  Your conference is Here.”  I mean, where do they eat?  In Lincoln, Nebraska, which has a big state university and a state capitol, there is a wine bar which is below an Indian restaurant, so you can have wine with a platter of Indian snacks, just as an example.  I have done this my own self.  Lincoln is part of what I call civilization.  Red Cloud is a couple of hours from civilization.  Farther, when Cather lived there.

Cather’s first book, The Troll Garden, is a collection of short stories largely on this exact theme.  The title character of “The Sculptor’s Funeral” only returns to his little town in Kansas when he dies.  No one there has any idea what to do with him.  The category of “artist” does not exist.  To be an artist, you go away, to There.  “A Wagner Matinee” is even more pathetic, or cruel.  An aunt visits Boston, from Nebraska, and goes to a concert.  The story ends, almost:

I spoke to my aunt.  She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. “I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!”

The last paragraph describes where she has to go – Nebraska.

“Paul’s Case” is set in Pittsburgh and is on the same theme, a reminder that the city itself is no kind of guarantee.  For a long time, “Paul’s Case” was the only Cather I had read, but it was some Cather, and therefore I had read Cather.

But now, My Ántonia and A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925), so I will write a note or two on those.

reading some famous U.S. novels of the 1920s - in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man

Not writing is a lot easier than writing, but I have some things I at least imagine I want to write, so I guess I will see if I remember how to write.  American books, Mimesis, British books, French books.  I am tired of being ignorant in private, so I will return, for a while, to being ignorant in public.

I feel that I do not know American literature especially well, but of course I know it better than any other; the feeling of not knowing it is an illusion caused by being surrounded by the stuff my whole life.  I also feel that I have recently immersed myself in American literature of, mostly, the first half of the 1920s, although when I add it up it is not really that many books.  Another illusion, caused by reading not just a pile of novels but also Langston Hughes’s great memoir of the ‘20s, The Big Sea (1940) and Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light (1952), like I am really digging in.

But many of the books – well, the fiction, not the poetry, whole ‘nother world there – are famous ones, sizable Humiliations that I have avoided for decades, so famous that they seemed all too familiar even if I did not really know exactly what was in them.  The Age of Innocence (1920), An American Tragedy (1925), Babbitt (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald, some Willa Cather novels – they seemed maybe a little dull.  They're not really so dull.

I am not used to reading such popular books.  They were big best-sellers, top 10 of the year, or close.  Cather was not in that game, although she sold pretty well, and Dreiser’s novel does not make the Top 10, but it made him instantly wealthy, allowing him to spend the rest of his life trying to write a “book of philosophy entitled The Formula Called Man” (Library of America timeline, 1935) and advocating for Stalinism.  Terrific.

Learning about Fitzgerald’s finances explained half of his life to me.  In 1919, he is almost unpublished; in 1920 he is selling stories, several of them, to the Saturday Evening Post for $3,000 a pop*. How much would that be today?  $39,291.61 – holy cow!  Plus he is getting movie money, options and so on, although at this point Fitzgerald and Dreiser and Wharton make as much money from selling books, not the rights to books.

Lewis was a hack writer who with Main Street (1920), which I have not read, hit on a perfect satirical comic formula, perfect for his audience but more importantly perfect for his talent.  Every couple of years he could write one on a new topic: business, religion, science, politics.  Let me fill out the magnificent quotation from Babbitt I put in the title:

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” (Ch. XIV.iii)

The irony goes a couple of different directions there, doesn't it?  Another irony is that this, or something like it, wins Lewis a Nobel Prize.  Dreiser was a real possibility for a Nobel, too, for that big clunker of all things.  Plenty of prizes, plenty of prestige, are attached to these books, along with the cash.

I’ll wander through American literature for a few days and see what I remember.  Then it will be back to the booze and spaghetti.

* I made a grotesque error of memory here, which I corrected in a later post. Fitzgerald quickly hopped to $900 per story, and pretty soon "Benjamin Button" earned $1,000 - but not $3,000. Still, the basic point, about the huge amount of money suddenly dropped on Fitzgerald, is intact. Just not so much per story

The story of what had happened was written plainly - some Willa Cather mythology

O Pioneers! is pretty good as novelistic sociology – the mix of immigrant groups in late 19th century Nebraska, their speech patterns, their habits.  But Cather is also up to something else.  She is myth-making.

The protagonist is a kind of earth goddess, for example, in tune with the land, prophetic about the weather.  She is visited in recurring dreams by some sort of male corn god (“he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him”).  After the dreams, “angry with herself,” she gives her “gleaming white body” a good scrub with “cold well-water” (III, 2 for all of this).  Hmm.  Maybe this is why I was not assigned the novel in high school – too much sex.

The minor character Crazy Ivar speaks only Norwegian, goes barefoot, knows the language of the birds, and, to top it off, lives in a hole in the ground (“Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank”) in a part of the country where the “wild flowers disappeared,” (I, 3)  Yesterday I called him a symbolic link to the Old Country, but he also appears to be a genuine troll, one of many who will appear at Wuthering Expectations this year.

Long ago I took a course in Greek and Roman mythology.  The professor at one point described his admiration for Willa Cather, based in part on her deep love of myth.  For example, he said, in one of her novels she borrows the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid (Book IV of Metamorphoses), in which two nitwit lovers kill themselves for no good reason, in the process staining a mulberry bush with their blood:

With that, his body on his sword he threw:
Which, from the reaking wound, he dying drew.
Now, on his back, vp-spun the blood in smoke:
As when a Spring-conducting pipe is broke,
The waters at a little breach breake out,
And hissing, through the aëry Region spout.
The Mulberryes their former white forsake;
And from his sprinkling blood their crimson take.  (from the great George Sandys translation, 1632)

The great Ovidian touch here is the ridiculous and sublime comparison of the jet of blood to the broken pipe.  And here it was, in O Pioneers!.

Cather borrows not the story, exactly, or only does so with a lot of distance, but the mulberries, and the blood:

While Ivar was hurrying across the fields, the first long rays of the sun were reaching down between the orchard boughs to those two dew-drenched figures.  The story of what had happened was written plainly on the orchard grass, and on the white mulberries that had fallen in the night and were covered with dark stain.  (IV, 8) 

In the next paragraph, the stained berries are mentioned again.  The slain lovers have been transformed:

two white butterflies from Frank's alfalfa-field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart; and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die.

Those roses may go a bit too far.  This is what I meant by the foregrounding of symbolism.  How can you miss the interlaced shadows and pink hearts?  You are not meant to miss them.

Yet Cather merely brushes against Ovid’s mulberries.  No arrow points at them – “classical reference here.”  There is no need at all for the reader to recognize the story, and no hint that it is there.  None of the characters have any idea of it.  It is not worked in to the novel but just there, in a few lines.

What else did Cather hide?

It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature - the surface of O Pioneers!

Novels about Scandinavian immigrants to the United States are common enough to form their own little genre.  Karl Moberg’s Emigrants series (1951-61), for example, or Ole Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1924-5).  I have almost run out of examples, aside from the one I read recently, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913), in which some Norwegian immigrants have trouble making a go of it as farmers in south central Nebraska, then do pretty well but have other troubles.

I do not know Cather well, having read nothing but her 1905 short story collection The Troll Garden.  I thought O Pioneers! was a bit on the simple side, told in plain language, plainer than most of The Troll Garden, perhaps meant to fit the plain people, or the Great Plains, with motives and behavior clearly explained and any symbolic material clearly foregrounded so that no one can miss it.  Cather famously opposed the use of her novels as school texts, and now I see why – O Pioneers! is perfect for the job.  Maybe a little too perfect.

It puzzles me why it was not used in my Great Plains school, not so far from Cather’s home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska.  We were only assigned boy’s books, and O Pioneers! is certainly not one of those.  Its heroine, Alexandra Bergson, is the strongest of strong female characters who knows her own mind, follows her own heart, saves the farm, respects difference, and is in tune with the earth:

Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air.  She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march.  It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.  That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it…  She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun.  Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.  (I, 5)

I hope it is evident enough what I mean by plainness, here mixed with some vague gesturing at meaning.

When I say the symbolism is foregrounded, I mean something like the use of this wild duck:

In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade.  They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure.  No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck.  Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, "Sister, you know our duck down there--"  Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.  (III, 2)

More earth mothery, but ducks are also used to pull a couple more characters together , linking Alexandra to the bird-loving Crazy Ivar, symbolic representation of the Old Country and its Authentic Ways, and linking brother Emil to the restless, all too tempting Marie.  “He snatched the ducks out of her apron” and so on, in Part II, Chapter 5, just after Ivar is mentioned making a pleasing, artful referential loop with the  duck theme.

The novel is certainly worth reading and easy to enjoy – for adults, I mean, not poor bored high school students.  But I am not convinced that there is that much more to it.  Well, there is at least one more thing.  I will save the Greek myths for tomorrow.

The Best Books of 1913 - Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare / On, on upward thro' the golden air!

This was a strange year for anniversaries.  It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern).  Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts.  Austen and Proust both have industries around them.

Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives.  It is one of the great novels of the century.  Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity.  At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb.  Yet it is a cult novel in English.  I have no idea why.  It is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels.

If you polled readers or critics fifty years ago, asking them which novel would get the most attention at its centennial, Swann’s Way or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, I wonder if Lawrence would not top the poll.  How he has fallen.  Or how Proust has risen.  Some of both.  Sons and Lovers is doing all right for itself.

Perhaps a French reader can let me know if Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes has gotten much centennial celebration in France, where it is as well-known as, I don’t know, its titular cousin The Great Gatsby.  In English, another cult book.

I am never sure if I should do a Best of 191X post.  For the 19th century, I have read more of the books I am mentioning, so I know what the books are, not just how they are known.  In 1913, I see Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I have not read (nor have I read the Lawrence novel).  I just started the Cather, out of a sense of shame.

1913 was a deeply interesting year for poetry.  It produced a crop of first or second books by major poets, a number of which may well not be major books themselves – see above, haven’t read them – but remind me how quickly poetry was changing.  Maybe not as quickly as painting, but close.  D. H. Lawrence, again, Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, Guilliame Apollinaire’s Alcool, William Carlos Williams.

Subscribers to the hot new magazine Poetry would read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” alongside (more or less) Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd   :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough    .

(for those who do not know it, that’s the entire poem) and Vachel Lindsay’s rather different “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”:

Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

You’re supposed to sing this, accompanied by bass drum and banjos.  Pound and Lindsay support Kilmer’s argument, since neither poem is as lovely as a tree, although they have other virtues.  There is another line from the Lindsay poem that I was tempted to use as my title: “But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.”  That was the poetry of 1913.  And the music.  And the painting.  And some of the novels, too.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Transformed Dream, picked almost at random from a superb year of paintings, can be seen free of charge at the Saint Louis Art Museum.  How interesting, André Breton owned it for a long time.