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.

to find a new beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place - H. D.'s beautiful and intense Sea Garden

H. D.’s first book, Sea Garden (1916) is a classic of seashore poems, in the old American tradition of Walt Whitman.  Almost every poem in it is a shore poem, with the shore being simultaneously in imaginary Greece and remembered – oh, Maine, New Jersey, wherever young Hilda went on vacation.  Poems are about shrines to sea gods – “The Shrine,” “The Cliff Temple,” “Sea Gods” – and shore plants – “Sea Rose,” “Sea Lily,” “Sea Poppies,” “Sea Violet,” Sea Iris.”

Violets are everywhere.
Violets in clumps from hills,
tufts with earth at the roots,
violets tugged from rocks,
blue violets, moss, cliff, river-violets.  (from “Sea Gods,” II – the entire section is about violets)

The most common fruit is the pear, which I don’t associate with the sea, but anyways:

O white pear,
your flower-tufts
thick on the branch
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.  (from “Pear Tree”)

These samples are representative enough to show the difficulties of the book.  Is H. D. doing more than describing some object?  Are these Rilke-like Thing Poems?  They sometimes seem like it.  Plenty of flowers in Rilke’s New Poems, too.  And as in Rilke, maybe more so, the poet is strongly present, even if it is hard to pin down who or what she might be:

from Sheltered Garden

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath…
I have had enough –
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

The poet protests against the greenhouse, or whatever the shelter is, the “pears wadded in cloth,” and demands that the fruit be exposed to the frost:

it is better to taste of frost –
the exquisite frost –
than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life…

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

“Sheltered Garden” is towards the middle of the book, so H. D. has already been clear about what that new beauty looks like: the “harsh” sea rose or the “slashed and torn” sea lily.  Or, presumably, a poem, as in “The Gift,” where the gift, in place of pearls, is the poem itself.  Pear, garden, violets – skip all that for this strange ending:

Only a still place
and perhaps some outer horror
some hideousness to stamp beauty,
a mark – no changing it now –
on our hearts.

Her heart was torn, a bit earlier in the poem, by a flower, which is I believe what that last line refers to.  “The Gift” is a love poem, but from a partner who is going to be a handful.

I could laugh –
more beautiful, more intense?

Emphasize both instances of “more,” as if the speaker is incredulous.  Impossible!

In her next few books, H. D. moves away from the astringency of the Sea Garden poems, particularly by working in more explicitly Greek content – more translations, more mythology – to the point of monotony.  Let’s see, which story is this, who is the speaker, where are we in the story?  Interesting poems, but similar.  The distance of the sea flower poems is replaced by a different kind of distance, with the old stories as the object rather than the flowers or rocks.  Come to think of it, Rilke did the same thing.  The old stories tell my story, the poet says, if I just change the emphasis a little.

Do you really think your song will save you? ---- fragments of H. D.

I read Arthur Waley’s early translations from the Chinese alongside the Collected Poems of H. D. (1925), containing her first five books, Sea Garden (1916), The God (1917), Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides (1919), Hymen (1921), and Heliodora (1924).  The titles alone give a sense of the comparison.  The young Modernist poets are plundering old traditions for new ideas.  For H. D., the tradition that really works, that she can use to express her own ideas and identity, in the Classical Greek lyric, especially as found in Sappho, the Greek Anthology, and the plays of Euripides.

There is something about the bright, thick, overstuffed English poetry of the 1890s that became dated almost immediately, so that the next generation of poets could not use it.  H. D. loved Swinburne, the great predecessor of the Decadents, and shared his love of Sappho and other Greek lyricists, but she could not write like him and be herself.  Who could.

H. D., Pound, and others were not really searching old traditions for innovations for their own sake, but for their own means of self-expression.  That us what I am trying to say here.  H. D. expressed herself by translating Sappho and Euripides.

The only book I had read by H. D. before, by the way, was her gorgeous 1937 version of Ion.  When I read the first edition owned by the University of Chicago library, the pages were uncut.  Not a center of H. D. studies, I guess. It was interesting to see that she had been working on the play for years, with early quite different fragments appearing in Choruses and Heliodora:

from The bird-chorus of Ion

ah drift,
ah drift
so light, so light,
your scarlet foot so deftly placed
to waft you neatly
to the pavement,
swan, swan
and do you really think
your song
that tunes the harp of Helios,
will save you
from the arrow-flight?  (in Heliodora)

Pieces of Hippolytus are scattered through the early books, too.  Those I can identify, and the Sappho translations, adaptations and riffs are clear enough, like “Fragment Thirty-Six”, which begins:

I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song’s gift best?
is love’s gift loveliest?  (in Heliodora)

Of the eighty or so lines, I think only the first two are Sappho’s, the rest an extension or completion of Sappho.  A more up-to-date Collected Poems would be useful just to tell me when H. D. is concealing translated lines of classical Greek in her poems.

Subsequent writings by H. D. and others have added an enormous amount of biographical context to her work.  Although I am not as ignorant as her original readers, I am pretty close.  The original readers did not even know Hilda Doolittle’s name, for pity’s sake, much less her sex or who she had dated.

Actually, I did look up one point – had the Greece-obsessed H. D. been to Greece?  She visited in 1920, right in the middle of this period.  So, no, and then, yes.  The poems are about Greece and also about something else.

Maybe I should write something about the poems themselves.  Sea Garden, in particular, is a heck of a book.