TIRED
If I shall make no poems any more,
There will be rest, at least, so let it be,
Time to look up at golden stars and listen
To the long mellow thunder of the sea.
The year will turn for me, I shall delight in
All animals, and some of my own kind;
Sharing with no one but myself the frosty
And half ironic musings of my mind.
Gladys Cromwell
Gladys Cromwell was born November 28, 1885, in New York City. She was educated in New York private schools and lived abroad a great deal. “Her life,” writes Anne Dunn, “was little indented by outer events, being wholly of the mind and spirit.” She was most at home in the world within herself, sensitive and—to the final, tragic degree—self-effacing.
In January, 1918, Gladys and Dorothea, her twin-sister, enrolled in the Canteen Service of the Red Cross, sailed for France and were stationed at Châlons. Both girls worked unremittingly for eight months. It was only at the end of their desperate labors that they gave way to hopelessness, believing their efforts futile and the whole world desolate. Signs of a mental breakdown show in their diaries as early as October. “After the armistice,” writes Anne Dunn in her biographical note which serves as an appreciative epilogue to Gladys Cromwell’s Poems, “they showed symptoms of nervous prostration; but years of self-control and consideration for others made them conceal the black horror in which they lived, the agony through which they saw a world which, they felt, contained no refuge for beauty or quiet thought. And when, on their way home, they jumped from the deck of the Lorraine it was in response to a vision that promised them fulfilment and peace.” After their death, which occurred January 19, 1919, the French Government awarded the two sisters the Croix de Guerre.
Gates of Utterance (1915) has something more than the usual “promise.” But the best of Miss Cromwell’s work can be found in her posthumously published Poems (1919), which, in 1920, received the yearly prize offered by the Poetry Society of America, dividing the honor with Neihardt’s The Song of Three Friends. Her most significant poems betray that attitude to life which was at the heart of her tragedy—a preoccupation that was a mixture of fascination and fear. Her lines, never mediocre, are introspective and fraught with serious concern—the work of a frailer and unsmiling Emily Dickinson. Several of the best of her delicate songs, like the two lyrics quoted, tremble on the verge of greatness.
THE CROWNING GIFT[[51]]
I have had courage to accuse;
And a fine wit that could upbraid;
And a nice cunning that could bruise;
And a shrewd wisdom, unafraid
Of what weak mortals fear to lose.
I have had virtue to despise
The sophistry of pious fools;
I have had firmness to chastise;
And intellect to make me rules
To estimate and exorcise.
I have had knowledge to be true;
My faith could obstacles remove;
But now my frailty I endue.
I would have courage now to love,
And lay aside the strength I knew.
THE MOULD[[52]]
No doubt this active will,
So bravely steeped in sun,
This will has vanquished Death
And foiled oblivion.
But this indifferent clay,
This fine, experienced hand
So quiet, and these thoughts
That all unfinished stand,
Feel death as though it were
A shadowy caress;
And win and wear a frail
Archaic wistfulness.
Ezra Pound
Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 1885; attended Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania; and went abroad, seeking fresh material to complete a thesis on Lope de Vega, in 1908. After visiting Spain on a roundabout journey to England, where he took up his residence and where he has lived ever since, Pound halted for a while in Italy. It was there, in Venice, to be precise, that Pound’s first book, A Lume Spento (1908), was printed. The following year Pound went to London and the chief poems of the little volume were incorporated in Personæ (1909), a small collection containing some of Pound’s finest work.
Although the young American was a total stranger to the English literary world, his book made a definite impression on critics of all shades and tastes. Edward Thomas, one of the most careful appraisers, wrote “the beauty of it is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions.... The thought dominates the words and is greater than they are.” Another critic (Scott James) placed the chief emphasis on Pound’s metrical innovations, saying, “At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without beauty. But as we read on, these curious meters seem to have a law and order of their own.”
Exultations (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same year that saw the appearance of Personæ. It was received with even greater cordiality; a new force and freedom were manifest in such poems as “Sestina: Altaforte,” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Francesca” and “Histrion.”
In both of these books there was evident Pound’s erudition—a familiarity with mediæval literature, Provençal singers, Troubadour ballads—that, later on, was to degenerate into pedantry and become hard and dry. Too often in his later work, Pound seems to be more the archaeologist than the artist, digging with little energy and less enthusiasm. Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912) both contain much that is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of desiccation and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start movements which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend himself in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see Preface); to give more and more time to translation (The Sonnets of Guido Cavalcanti appeared in 1912) and arrangements from the Chinese (Cathay, paraphrased from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, was issued in 1915); to lay the chief stress on technique, shades of color, verbal nuances. The result was a lassitude of the creative faculties, an impoverishment of emotion. In the later books, Pound begins to suffer from a decadence which appraises the values in life chiefly as æsthetic values. And this decadence expresses itself in a weariness, a sterility of the imagination. Real feeling becomes rarer in his work and the poet descends to flashy trivialities, vagaries of assertion or sheer bravado of expression—wasting much of his gift in a mere tilting at convention.
But though this is true of a great quantity of his recent work, though he often seems a living anachronism, drawing life not from life itself but only from books, many of the poems in Lustra (1917) yield a hard brightness. The influence of Browning and the pre-Raphaelites is less pronounced and reflections of his earlier energy stand out with a peculiar brilliance.
Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become popular, Pound’s contribution to his age should not be underestimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought dullness wherever he encountered it; under his leadership the Imagists became not only a group but a protest; he helped to make many of the paths which a score of unconsciously influenced poets tread with such ease and nonchalance. Much of his poetry gesticulates instead of speaking, a great portion of his art is poetry in pantomime. And yet, without Pound, American poetry would scarcely have been the many-voiced, multi-colored thing that it is.