When Winter Comes to Main Street

by Grant M. Overton

“A certain rich intricacy of pattern distinguishes the physical body of Benét’s art; when he chooses he can use words as if they were the jewelled particles of a mosaic; familiar words, with his handling, become ‘something rich and strange.’ Of the spiritual content of his poems, we can say nothing adequate, because there is not much that can be said of spirit; either it is there and you feel it, and it works upon you, or it is not there. There are very few people writing verse today who have the power to charm us and enchant us and carry us away with them as Benét can. He has found the horse with wings.”

The Bookman Anthology of Verse (1922), edited by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, is an altogether extraordinary anthology to be made up from the poets contributing to a single magazine in eighteen consecutive months. Among those who are represented are: Franklin P. Adams, Karle Wilson Baker, Maxwell Bodenheim, Hilda Conkling, John Dos Passos, Zona Gale, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, David Morton, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Siegfried Sassoon, Sara Teasdale, Louis and Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Elinor Wylie.

Mr. Farrar has written short introductions to the example (or examples) of the work of each poet. In his general preface he says:

“Where most anthologies of poetry are collected for the purpose of giving pleasure by means of the verses themselves, I have tried here to give you something of the joy to be found in securing manuscripts, in attempting to understand current poetry by a broadening of taste to match broadening literary tendencies; and, perhaps most important of all, to present you to the poets themselves as I know them by actual meeting or correspondence.”

I will choose what Mr. Farrar says about Hilda Conkling, prefacing her poem “Lonely Song”; and then I will quote the poem:

“A shy, but normal little girl, twelve years old now, nine when her first volume of verses appeared, Hilda Conkling is not so much the infant prodigy as a clear proof that the child mind, before the precious spark is destroyed, possesses both vision and the ability to express it in natural and beautiful rhythm. Grace Hazard Conkling, herself a poet, is Hilda’s mother. They live at Northampton, Massachusetts, in the academic atmosphere of Smith College where those who know the little girl say that she enjoys sliding down a cellar stairway quite as much as she does talking of elves and gnomes. She was born in New York State, so that she is distinctly of the East. The rhythms which she uses to express her ideas are the result both of her own moods, which are often crystal-clear in their delicate imagery, and of the fact that from time to time, when she was first able to listen, her mother read aloud to her. In fact, her first poems were made before she, herself, could write them down. The speculation as to what she will do when she grows to womanhood is a common one. Is it important? A childhood filled with beauty is something to have achieved.”

Bend low, blue sky, Touch my forehead; You look cool ... bend down ... Flow about me in your blueness and coolness, Be thistledown, be flowers, Be all the songs I have not yet sung. Laugh at me, sky! Put a cap of cloud on my head ... Blow it off with your blue winds; Give me a feeling of your laughter Beyond cloud and wind! I need to have you laugh at me As though you liked me a little.

This has been, as I meant it to be, a wholly serious chapter; but at the end I find I cannot stop without speaking of Keith Preston. No one who reads the Chicago Daily News fails to know Keith Preston’s delightful humour and “needle-tipped satire.” And his book, Splinters, contains all sorts of good things of which I can give you, alas, only some inadequate (because solitary) sample. Yet, anyway, here is his “Ode to Common Sense”:

Spirit or demon, Common Sense! Seen seldom by us mortals dense, Come, sprite, inform, inhabit me And teach me art and poetry. Teach me to chuckle, sly as you, At gods that now I truckle to, To doubt the New Republic’s bent, And jeer each bookish Supplement. Now, like a thief, you come and flit, You call so seldom, Mother Wit! Remember? Once when you stood by I found a Dreiser novel dry. One day when I was reading hard— What? Amy Lowell, godlike bard! You peeped and then at what you saw Gave one Gargantuan guffaw. Spirit or demon, coarse or rude, (Sometimes I think you must be stewed) Brute that you are, I love your powers, But,—drop in after office hours! Yes, Common Sense, be mine, I ask, But still respect my critic’s task; Molest me not when I’m employed With psychics, sex, vers libre, or Freud.