Let it explain / Me its life - the best books of 1916, in a sense

I usually do not mess around with a “best of a hundred years ago” post, however fun it might be, because I am too ignorant to make basic judgments.  To the best of my knowledge, for example, I have read no more than four novels from 1916: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sholem Aleichem’s cheery Motl the Cantor’s Son (I think just the second half, Motl in America, is from 1916), Gustav Meyrink’s well-titled Bats, and L. Frank Baum’s Rinkitink in Oz.  However easy it is to pick out the best book from this group – Rinkitink is awesome – I do not have a good sense of what other novels are in contention.

But this year I have been reading a lot of English-language poetry from 1916 – eight or ten books depending on how I count – plus, recently, plenty of individual poems from French, Italian, German, and Russian from various collections, so I thought I would pull some of them together.  Maybe just the books, to make my task easier.

It is the ferment that is so exciting, the variety, the movement.  On the one hand, Robert Graves, in his first chapbooks Over the Brazier and Goliath and David, sounding like Housman or Hardy, skilled but not radical:

from The Shadow of Death

Here’s an end to my art!
    I must die and I know it,
With battle murder at my heart –
    Sad death for a poet!

The old forms are good enough for war poetry.

Then there’s Lustra of Ezra Pound:

from Further Instructions

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops
You do next to nothing at all.

Which is not really how it seems, reading the poems and their mixture of ancient Greek, classical Chinese, and now.

H. D. wants her songs to do something.  In Sea Garden she strips them down more than Pound, merging the Maine coasts with ancient Greek myths to create her new voice:

from Sheltered Garden

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

Make it new, make it new, as explicitly as possible, in this year of the birth of Dada.

Even for Pound, though, “newness” was less a goal of its own than a search for a voice, which is closer to what I see in 1916.  Many poets, not all but many, found the old poetic modes inadequate, at least not them, thus all the improvisation, innovation, and flailing about.  What, in Amores, is D. H. Lawrence trying to do that is new other than express himself?

from Restlessness

But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good.
There is something I want to fell in my running blood,
Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain,
I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain
Me its life as it hurries in secret.

I am not sure that is good, but is it ever Lawrence.  Their flavors are not as strong as Lawrence’s, but H. D. is working on a similar problem; so are Isaac Rosenberg (Moses) and Conrad Aiken (The Jig of Forslin, A Symphony and Turns and Movies).  Edwin Arlington Robinson (The Man against the Sky) has already found a strong voice. Robert Frost is only on his third book, Mountain Interval, but it feels as if he had been Frost forever.  Maybe I should have started this post with Frost.  What a confident poet.

from The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

And, I remind myself, I have heard poets singing just as loudly in Russian, German, Italian, and French.  The list is long; the idea of “best” becomes moot.

The question that he frames in all but words - Frost's Mountain Interval

Mountain Interval (1916), Robert Frost’s third book, and third book of poems in four years, is more lyrics than dialogues, with a variety of forms, sonnets and so on (plus a few longer blank verse dialogues, just like those in North of Boston) beginning with “The Road Not Taken,” now, somehow, something like the most famous American poem because of the illusion that it contains a self-congratulatory self-help message.  I guess.

My favorite Frost poem, the one I remembered most strongly since the last time I read Frost with any seriousness, is in this book:

from ‘Out, Out –‘

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood.
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.

An accident occurs, the one maybe you were expecting, even given the distraction of those mountains and that sweet smell.  The boy who is injured “saw all / Since he was old enough to know.”  The title is from Macbeth, but we get a look at Frost’s classicism here, as the boy is a perfect Stoic.  The last lines, though, introduce another kind of stoicism:

No more to build on there.  And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

It is a firmly unsentimental poem, neither folksy nor reassuring, an astringent counter-example to the Hallmark card reputation Frost has picked up over the years.

I love this cider-drunk cow, too, drawn from life, I suppose:

The Cow in Apple Time

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup.  Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

The poem echoes – quotes – poems from North of Boston, including “The Mending Wall” and “After Apple-Picking,” suggesting a self-parody.  But Frost produces poems, at least.  Maybe I am the cow, reading delicious poems and producing nothing.  But look at that pasture – there’s no grass left, what am I supposed to do?

I am likely too quick to interpret poems as being about poems, I know, but then I come across “The Oven Bird,” “a singer everyone has heard”:

The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

On the one hand, I see a real bird, its song signaling the end of summer, and on the other, he sounds pretty Frosty.

What a debut.  The next book, New Hampshire, comes in 1923, seven years later, forever, compared to this first burst of poems.

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall - some Frost prosody

What is in North of Boston (1914)?  It begins and ends with lyrics, including an epigraph poem that looks like a possibly deceptive statement of purpose:

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);
I shan’t be gone long. – You come too.

I’m going to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother.  It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long. – You come too.

Yep, just a simple country poet, gazing upon nature and chronicling acts of agriculture.  Thus poems about repairing stone walls, picking blueberries, picking apples, unloading hay, chopping wood, and so on.  I do appreciate Frost’s invitation.

The book does not sound much like this, though, except in the number of feet.  Much of the book is in dialogue, and almost all of it in a loose and flexible blank verse, with two additional exceptions, “Blueberries,” odd eleven-syllable lines of rhyming couplets and triplets (but I just notices this one, so who knows what I have missed), and “After Apple-Picking,” which is mostly blank verse but occasionally collapses into shorter lines, matching the conceit of the poem, which is that the speaker is too tired:

For I have had too much
Of apple picking.  I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the apple-cider heap
As of no worth.

“Stubble” then rhymes with “trouble.”  The rhyming is irregular and subtler than this passage suggests, as if the poet is too tired to keep to a single scheme.  I have suspicions that this is a poem about writing poems.  But it is also a poem about harvesting apples.

More typically, there is a lot of this:

‘You needn’t smile – I didn’t recognize him –
I wasn’t looking for him – and he’s changed.
Wait till you see.’

                               ‘Where did you say he’s been?’

‘He didn’t say.  I dragged him to the house,
And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.
I tried to make him talk about his travels.
Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.’  (from “The Death of the Hired Man”)

Lots of lines that do not look like anything special by themselves, do not look poetic, whatever that might mean.  Plain speech, except always rhythmic.  Language that has been heightened or energized, but just barely, so it still registers as ordinary as well as poetic.  This voice, simultaneously plain and not, seems like one of Frost’s great discoveries.

No one would put up with this at any length is it were not for Frost’s gift as a storyteller.  “The Death of the Hired Man” could have been a fine short story.  But this post is about prosody, dang it.

He is in love with being misunderstood - Some early Robert Frost

Robert Frost was 39 when his first book, A Boy’s Will, was published in 1913.  North of Boston came out in 1914, Mountain Interval in 1916.  What a run of books.  North of Boston leads with “Mending Wall,” and Mountain Interval with “The Road Less Taken.”  And everyone – Pound, Yeats, etc. – recognized Frost’s poems, right away, for their worth.  A career’s worth of poems in just a few years, with many more books to come, decades of poems, a string of prizes and university appointments.

North of Boston, with longer poems, more dialogues and stories, and Mountain Interval, with more lyrics, are both astounding.  Without much in the way of formal innovation, Frost developed a voice – several voices – that sounded like an American version of early Wordsworth, ordinary New Englanders who somehow always speak and think in a heightened blank verse, who find meaning in work and the natural world.  Frost was a serious classicist, and his influences were as much Latin* as English, but those two latter books feel to me like the first serious American descendants of Wordsworth, by a “VURRY Amur’k’n talent,”** as Pound, that goofball, described Frost.

Frost’s first book, though, A Boy’s Will, that one I don’t get.  The table of contents of the original edition included a series of annotations that help explain my difficulties***:

Into My Own  The youth is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world.
Ghost House  He is happy in the society of his own choosing.
My November Guest  He is in love with being misunderstood.

And so on, each explication funnier than the previous (“The Demiurge’s Laugh  about science,” yeesh).

These notes make the poems sound unbearable, which they are not, and Frost had the sense to drop them in every future edition, leaving cruel editors to stick them back in.  There is at least some self-mockery in A Boy’s Will:

In Neglect

They leave us so to the way we took,
    As two in whom they were proved mistaken,
That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,
With mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look,
    And try if we cannot feel forsaken.

The adult poet has plenty of ironic distance from the adolescent feelings described in the poems.

The title character in “My November Guest” is a female personification of sorrow, which could hardly be more boyish:

Her pleasure will not let me stay
    She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
    Is silver now with clinging mist.

A Boy’s Will is exceedingly autumnal.  It is perhaps meant to be growth that the boy learns, contra Sorrow, to miss the birds:

Now Close the Windows

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
    If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
    Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
    It will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
    But see all wind stirred.

A sequence of poems about storms, dead butterflies, and falling leaves begins.  Perhaps the boy has been dumped by his girlfriend:

from Reluctance

Ah, when to the heart of man
    Was it ever less than treason
To go with the drift of things,
    To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
    Of a love or a season?

So ends the book, on this note of resigned anti-wisdom.  The poems in A Boy’s Will are very pretty.  Now that I got.

* “It [North of Boston] was written as scattered poems in a form suggested by the eclogues of Virgil,” “Preface to an Expanded ‘North of Boston,’” Collected Prose, Poems, & Plays, Library of America, p. 849.

**  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2, Third Ed., p. 1,082.

*** LOA, p. 969.