Alas! I can say nothing. Cicero’s invectives have given out. And Shakespeare cursed satisfactorily only for the English. An English curse upon American lips would resemble the British matron’s earnest disapproval of moon-jumping cows.
Amy Lowell was never really a writer. She wanted to write. She had leisure and money. She put words upon paper. But she never projected the powerful phrase, produced ideas, nor kept in key. As a scholar she was slipshod, of slight importance. She was merely another rich wholly American problem in addition. And the bloodless, numbing sun of New England summers had shone too long, too coldly upon her.
Catullus was beauty, youth, joy, and the delight of a lovely city of long ago, and my enduring outpost of pleasure. I read him daily. He helps correct for me the barren, fleeting years, which are sweeping me away from all the things for which I have ever cared.
To me the greatest love-poem in existence is that pitiful one:
Si qua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas.
To procure pleasure from reading, I must have some of the perfection pitiful Catullus kept. I must have passion and word-craft, and penetration, power, and the deep, quick sensing of truths. In these days of art-predatory pedants, jazz-extras, circus-advertising, and writing-schools, I turn to the Roman; I turn to the Greek Anthology; the old dreaming masters of the East. Beauty belonged to the elder world, story-telling wisdom, and the careless phrase of completeness. The antique world ... that understood form. The scientific world upon whose threshold we stand will not need the old arts. It will have new ones all its own. That is why they are dying. And so when I say anything derogatory, it is not I who speak, but the age, through me.
What a tragic, bitter love was that which ate up the heart of Catullus! His cry pierced the centuries. It has even silenced the multiple voice of mighty cities.
You took away from me all my joy!
But when he ceased to love and suffer, he ceased to write. He was most brilliant and compelling when he was lifted upon the brutal edge of great emotion. To me he has cut words with keener lament than Sappho. When he reached the height of the fury of youth, the poet died. Or did the sadness of the Christian centuries—now swinging near—shadow his sensitiveness? But how every little broken fragment of his days still shines! Only the sincere, the unforced, has vitality.
What a delightful maker of the mind’s gay moments, was Pliny the Younger! As I read along, the comprehension is forced upon me, that in my day the human mind is not so fine, or I am living at a period of time when something vastly different is being projected. I am conscious of a process of deterioration going forward rapidly in the present. Leaving the firmness and the power of his thinking out of the question, in grace of letter-writing, he equals Madame de Sévigné, whose genius was born of her heart.