Harriet Monroe’s Poetry
Eunice Tietjens
You and I, by Harriet Monroe. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
Right here in Chicago, under our very noses, there is dwelling personified a Real Force. It is done up in a neat and compact little package, as most real forces are that are not of the Krupp variety, and it works with so little fuss and fury that it takes some discernment to recognize it for a force at all. Nevertheless it is a power which is felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, in California, in Florida, in Canada, and in England. And wherever it is felt it is a liberating force, a force that ruthlessly shatters the outworn conventions of the art in which it operates, that tears away the tinsel trappings and bids art and beauty spring forth clean and untrammeled, to forge for themselves new forms that shall be fitting for the urge of today.
The name by which this force is known in every day parlance is Miss Harriet Monroe, and its manifestations are twofold—as poet and as editor. As editor she has created and kept alive the courageous little magazine Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which might almost, so far as Chicago is concerned, be called the spiritual older sister of The Little Review. It, too, in its own field, stands for the revolt of today against the hide-bound spirit of yesterday, and it, too, is a thorn in the side of the Philistines.
The most recent manifestation of Miss Monroe’s influence is, however, in her character as poet. She has collected together a large number of poems, most of which have already appeared in the leading magazines and have been widely copied, and has brought them out under the title You and I. Seeing them so collected, one is much better able to get a perspective on the poems themselves, and on the very interesting personality behind them. And they bulk large. Unquestionably this is one of the most important of the recent books of poetry.
You and I is essentially modern in spirit and in treatment. Miss Monroe has the power of looking with the eyes of the imagination at many of our modern institutions. The Hotel, The Turbine, The Panama Canal, The Ocean Liner—these are some of the subjects she treats with a real understanding and a sweep of vision that quite transfigures these work-a-day objects. And she is equally at home when writing of the great emotional complexity of State Street at Night or the simpler but more profound poignancy of the Elegy for a Child. Indeed, one of the noticeable things about the book is the unusually large range of themes treated.
There is also in this book the primal, but unfortunately rare, gift of wonder. This is one of the essential qualities of true poetry, and it furnishes Miss Monroe with the key-note of the book, an open-eyed, courageous facing of fate, and an unshakable belief in the redeeming power of beauty.
This little lyric may serve as an introduction to the spirit of the book:
THE WONDER OF IT
How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!
That the insensate rock dared dream of me,
And take to bursting out and burgeoning—
Oh, long ago——yo ho!——
And wearing green! How stark and strange a thing
That life should be!
Oh mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,
That dust should rise, and leap alive, and flee
Afoot, awing, and shake the deep with cries—
Oh, far away—yo hay!
What moony mask, what arrogant disguise
That life should be!
Scharmel Iris: Italian Poet
Milo Winter
Scharmel Iris, the first of the Italians in America to write poetry in English is a Florentine who was brought to Chicago when but an infant. Before his tenth year his poems attracted attention and were warmly praised by such men as Ruskin, Swinburne and Gosse. Later Francis Thompson and Richard Le Gallienne expressed appreciation. These poems which originally appeared in leading publications of England and America are gathered together for the first time and printed by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company (Fine Arts Building, Chicago; $1.00 net). The volume, entitled Lyrics of a Lad, contains his most desirable and characteristic lyrics and is a serious contribution to our poetic literature. These poems came to be respected as art through their freshness and originality—there are no trite, worn-out, meaningless phrases, or words of an abstract, generalized significance. Immortal beauty is a vision in his eyes and a passion in his heart, and he has labored to reveal it to the world. Art is a creation of men’s minds, and because Mr. Iris’s creation is direct and spontaneous it becomes greater art. This volume is not post-Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post-Kiplonian. This young poet has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint things as he sees them. Because this book is Scharmel Iris it is distinctive. It is without sham and without affectation. The announcement of its publication and his poems in The Little Review brought the publisher three-hundred orders. The book, slender and well-printed, has more real poetry than any volume of modern verse it has been our good fortune to read.
It is difficult to do an important book justice in a short article. Perhaps a miscellaneous quotation of lines will help:
The thrush spills golden radiance
From boughs of dusk;
The day was a chameleon;
In sweat and pangs the pregnant, Night
Brings forth the wondrous infant, Light;
Within the sunset-press, incarnadine,
The sun, a peasant, tramples out his wine;
You are the body-house of lust;
Where twilight-peacocks lord the place
Spendthrifts of pride and grace;
And lo, at Heaven’s blue-windowed house
God sets the moon for lamp;
The sunbeams sought her hair,
And rested there;
These mute white Christs—the daily crucified;
Lucretia Borgia fair
The poppy is.
The sunbeams dance in dawn’s ballet;
While sunset-panthers past her run
To caverns of the Sun;
When from the husk of dusk I shake the stars;
O dusk, you brown cocoon,
Release your moth, the moon,
Ah, since that night
When to her window, she came forth as light,
Have I been Beauty’s acolyte;
and there are many other striking lines. In The Visionary a poet steals the pennies on a dead man’s eyes to buy himself bread, and, after his death, the money denied him in life is in turn placed on his sightless eyes. It is irony of the bitterest sort. Late January is an excellent landscape—interpretive rather than descriptive. Scarlet—White is struck at the double standard, and is a strong and powerful utterance. April, Canzonette, Lady of the Titian Hair are exquisite and charming lyrics. Three graceful compositions are The Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid, Tarantella and Song for a Rose. The Ugly Woman will cause discussion, but it is good art. The trio of Spring Songs and Her Room are well nigh perfect. Mary’s Quest is very tender, as is also the Twilight Lullaby. The Leopard, Fantasy of Dusk and Dawn, The Forest of the Sky are wonderfully imaginative, and were written in Chicago,—in the grime and barrenness of Halsted Street. There is a poignant thing of five lines, a mother who is going blind over the death of a son. Her despair is hopeless and tragic—she makes a true and awful picture of realism in her grief. Heroes treats of the nameless heroes, daily met and overlooked. The love poems are sincere as all love poems must be. In Foreboding the note of sadness is emphatic—almost dominant; but there is more than mere sadness in it; it is not a minor note. It is tragedy, really, that speaks in such poetry:
Her cold and rigid hands
Will be as iron bands
Around her lover’s heart;
and
O’er thee will winter through the sky’s gray sieve
Sift down his charity of snow.
The Mad Woman (printed in Poetry) is as excellent as it is unusual, and few finer things have been done in any literature.
There is a fine flowing harmony about the poetry of Scharmel Iris that denotes a power far beyond that revealed by many of today’s singers. The poems are colorful and certainly musical and they display an adequate technique. Such a gift as his, revealed in a number of very fine achievements, gives promise of genuine greatness. After many years of discouragement and the hardest work, he has at last found a publisher who bears the cost of the edition, purely on the merit of the work. It contains a preface by Dr. Egan, American minister in Copenhagen, an attractive title-page decoration by Michele Greco, and a photogravure portrait of the author. By advancing the work of living poets like Mr. Iris one can repay the debt he owes to the old poets. This poetry (as The Little Review remarked) is not merely the sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.