A Great American Poet

A GREAT American poet! I had at last found him. It mattered not that I was an obscure student in a famous graduate school; it mattered not that great poets in their day had bowed down to Denham and to Bowles. Here was a real poet, alive, American, great, —

His lines burned in my veins as I sang or shouted them. I must share the intoxication with my friends.

The first victim was, of course, a young woman. To her I entrusted the precious little volume. ‘Read “The Daguerreotype,”’ I urged, ‘and tell me if it is not the heart’s blood of a true poet.’ She told me. It seemed to her a commonplace treatment of a commonplace theme.

Abashed but not discouraged, I turned to my good friend the German doctor. ‘Nomen est omen,’ was his first comment, as he glanced at the poet’s name; but he was anxious to widen his knowledge of English verse, and took kindly to whatever was philosophical, impressionistic, or sonorous. I can still hear his deep voice rumbling out, —

The German doctor, however, was insensitive to subtle shades of meaning in English words. For full appreciation I must go to my own professor of English.

Yes, to be sure, he had heard of my poet. We were all young once; he had once turned a verse or two himself. Whereupon he dug out a batch of dusty manuscript and read to me with reminiscent relish a number of his own puerilia. I left him moist-eyed and tender, with my little book unopened, unread, in his hand. Then if ever was the happy hour for him to chant,—

But he buried the volume five German dissertations deep on a side shelf, and I was not to see it again for three years.

Ten years have passed since my young enthusiasm invaded the sanctum of a great professor to proclaim the merits of a living poet. My poet is dead, tragically cut off at the summit of his powers; a single volume of less than five hundred pages lies before me, containing all the poetry he gave to the world, mere ‘drippings of the winepress of his days.’ As I turn the pages now, do the scales fall from my eyes? Have the years that bring the philosophic mind tempered my enthusiasm? Can I now, with the old ardor, thrust this volume in the faces of my friends?

A severe test, truly, for any but the highest. Can we return to Byron, to Shelley, to Swinburne, to Tennyson, him even, without feeling that something of the old charm has departed? Stephen Phillips captivated all of us with his beautiful Paolo and Francesca; yet we sometimes feel for his work the repugnance we have for lilies. But Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, Chaucer, Browning, and Keats, at their best, never disappoint us; our knowledge of life and art never outruns them. Has my poet a modest place in this high company?

I believe that he has. The poems that ten years ago made the blood leap in my veins still seem to me fresh and strong and beautiful. And I am confirmed in my belief by the admirable introduction which Professor Manly has written for this new and complete edition of his works. The poem that my young friend found commonplace, Professor Manly finds ‘so deep of thought, so full of poignant feeling and clairvoyant vision, so wrought of passionate beauty that I know not where to look for another tribute from any poet to his mother that equals it.’ The little volume that for three years lay buried five German dissertations deep, contained much of the best work of a man who ‘ brought the richest intellectual and emotional endowment possessed by any American poet,’ and whose poetry ‘was growing into fuller and fuller kinship with that of the elder and most authentic poets of our tongue, while retaining its own unmistakable individuality.’

If these things are indeed true, my long devotion has not been misplaced; I may still urge all my friends — mothers and maids and German doctors, even professors in their sanctums — to get and read and read again the poems and poetic dramas of William Vaughn Moody.¹