FOREWORD
The student of poetry in America enjoys an opportunity, such as has never been practicable for the European student, to come in contact with the source and mould of poetic form. For in Europe, the overlaying of all native activity by the sedulously cultivated Greek and Roman preferences, the deliberate turning of scholarly inquiry from what was self-sprung and indigenous toward what had been perfected in another environment and upon other roots, left the whole subject of the origin of form dangling in the atmosphere of theory and surmise. To this day the most that we know of the high forms of poesy in Europe is owed less to authentic tradition than to the scholastic rehumation of native remains in dance and ritual, of what was once, in the interest of the classic ideal, discarded and buried, or at the least, permitted to survive only among the unlettered folk.
Fortunately for our general understanding of poetic form, the Greeks had no such snobbish scruples as arose later throughout Europe against admitting the origin of their most majestic poetic medium in the communal dance around the tribal altar. Here in the United States we are, by a turn of fortune, undeserved and underappreciated, able to watch the evolution of poetic form from stages somewhat earlier than those recorded by Aristotle, going on as an indigenous type of human expression. We are face to face here with the evolution of lyric form out of the stanzaic act, ritualistically repeated; with the approach to the ode, along the path struck out by primitive man in the identification of himself with the sources of high states of being.
We confront these things as unselfconscious acts, rather than as fragmentary and over-annotated poetic remains. We are able to refer them directly to accompanying gestures, to generative social occasions, and the environmental matrix. And we have to guess or to theorize, where these things are obligatory, only in reference to minds whose movements are influenced by factors lying open to intelligent apprehension.
To point this out, by way of introduction to the first thoughtful attempt to put the material for a valid conclusion as to the origin of poetic form, in order for the unspecialized reader, is not to subtract anything from the difficulty of the task, nor to minimize the importance of the result. So careless has American scholarship been of our rich resources in this direction, that merely for Miss Barnes to have realized their richness and to have collected illustrative examples of them from the widely scattered and occasionally obscure sources, implies not only a general background of wide literary knowledge, but a fund of literary intelligence and much industry. It also implies a quality of restraint not infrequently lacking from such undertakings, in not attempting to bridge the gaps and supply the missing links by even the most plausible theory. Such restraint in view of the usual American demand for a complete tabloid statement, an assumption that does away with the necessity for further inquiry, is so much the more unusual that some of the credit for making this inquiry accessible surely devolves not only on the University in which it could take place, but upon the publisher who ventures to present it.
Merely by collecting from authentic sources, by discarding doubtful examples and by intelligent grouping of the best translations of Amerindian lyrics, according to their formative tendency, Miss Barnes has done more than perhaps she herself realizes, to uncover the influences at work on the primitive poetic impulse, to crystallize it into forms best suited to the expression of a progressively higher poetic content. To one who reads her simple statement of the relation of sacred numbers, fours and sixes and sevens, to what Miss Barnes calls the “thought rhythm” as determining the form of primitive verse, and reads it without other knowledge of Indians than is included in these pages, it will scarcely appear that the still profounder influence is the natural environment, determining the force of climate, landscape line, and food succession in the cultural life of the particular tribe. But to one familiar with environmental distinctions between Zuñi and Iroquois and Omaha, there will be distinctive pleasure in tracing relationships between verse forms and the known formative features of the given landscape. To such a reader there will also appear intimate relations between the repetitive pattern of formal elements, the range and interdependence of dance movements, and of decorative patterns of beadwork and textiles. It would, in fact, be very little trouble to accompany each poem in this collection with an appropriate design either of gesture or decorative elements, drawn from the life of that tribe, in which the distribution of formative elements would make a pattern recognizably that of the poem. As for example, in the Paiute Lament of a Man for His Son, the gesture of the first movement would be that inevitable to a man standing at the head of his son’s corpse, and striving beyond his grief to descry his son’s spirit walking the spirit road; the gesture of the second movement, the reverent, slightly swaying tread of friends bearing the body on their shoulders over uneven ground; and of the last movement, the final tearing wrench of human affection. In the same manner, the Iroquois Hymn on the dissolution of the Great League, carries the gesture of up-flung arms, and the bowing of heads that dust may be cast upon them; while in the Navaho and Pueblo Rain Chants, there is the recurrent but always slightly variable motif of the landscape as the determinant of the verbal pattern, as you can see on any old Zuñi tinaja. It is the precision with which Miss Barnes makes these things appear to the initiate, without at the same time obscuring the more obvious conclusions for the average reader, which distinguishes what she has to say above all other writings on the subject. No one who reads her notes on Amerindian verse forms need feel the limitation of personal knowledge a hindrance to his æsthetic and intellectual enjoyment of the poems themselves.
I know of but one parallel to this achievement in the current descriptions of aboriginal culture in the United States. That is in George Bird Grinnell’s account of Cheyenne games, in which, without saying as much, the relation of all games to man’s aboriginal puzzlement about the world he lives in is convincingly brought out. Mr. Grinnell’s account should be read in connection with Miss Barnes’ work for the further light it throws on the origin of patterns, social, decorative, or literary, in living human impulses. In so far as any study does this, and especially as it does it in respect to areas of literary activity all too scantily familiar, it constitutes an indispensable service to American scholarship.
Mary Austin.