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Prefaces To Amy Lowell

’s Collections Essay, Research Paper


Preface from Lowell’s Men, Women, and Ghosts


(New York: Macmillan Company, 1917) vii-xii.


This is a book of stories. For that reason I have excluded all


purely lyrical poems. But the word "stories" has been stretched to its fullest


application. It includes both narrative poems, properly so called tales divided into


scenes; and a few pieces of less obvious story telling import in which one might say that


the dramatis personae are air, clouds, trees, houses, streets, and such like


things.


It has long been a favourite idea of mine that the rhythms of vers libre have


not been sufficiently plumbed, that there is in them a power of variation which has never


yet been brought to the light of experiment. I think it was the piano pieces of Debussy,


with their strange likeness to short vers libre poems, which first showed me the


close kinship of music and poetry, and there flashed into my mind the idea of using the


movement of poetry in somewhat the same way that the musician uses the movement of music.


It was quite evident that this could never done in the strict pattern of a metrical


form, but the flowing, fluctuating rhythm of vers libre seemed to open the door to such an


experiment. First, however, I considered the same method as applied to the more pronounced


movements of natural objects. If the reader will turn to the poem, "A Roxbury


Garden," he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give the circular


movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up and down, elliptical curve of a


flying shuttlecock.


From these experiments, it is but a step to the flowing rhythm of music. In "The


Cremona, Violin," I have tried to give this flowing, changing rhythm to the parts in


which the violin is being played, The effect is farther heightened, because the rest of


the poem is written in the seven line Chaucerian stanza; and, by deserting this ordered


pattern for the undulating line of vers libre, I hoped to produce something of the


suave, continuous tone of a violin. Again, in the violin parts themselves, the movement


constantly changes, as will be quite plain to any one reading these passages aloud.


In "The Cremona Violin," however, the rhythms are fairly obvious and regular.


I set myself a far harder task in trying to transcribe the various movements of


Stravinsky’s "Three Pieces ‘Grotesques,’ for String Quartet." Several musicians,


who have seen the poem, think the movement accurately given.


These experiments lead me to believe that there is here much food for thought and


matter for study, and I hope many poets will follow me in opening up the still hardly


explored possibilities of vers libre.


A good many of the poems in this book, are written in "polyphonic prose." A


form about which I have written and spoken so much that it seems hardly necessary to


explain it here. Let me hastily add, however, that the word "prose" in its name


refers only to the typo- graphical arrangement, for in no sense is this prose form. Only


read it aloud, Gentle Reader, I beg, and you will see what you will see. For a purely


dramatic, form, I know none better in the whole range of poetry. It enables the Poe to


give his characters the vivid, real effect the, have in a play, while at the same time


writing in the decor.


One last innovation I have still to mention. It will be found in "Spring


Day," and more fully enlarged upon in the series, "Towns in Colour." In


these poems, I have endeavoured to give the colour, and light, and shade, of certain


places and hours, stressing the purely pictorial effect, and with little or no reference


to any other aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander through a


city looking for its unrelated beauty, the beauty by which it captivates the sensuous


sense of seeing.


I have always loved aquariums, but for years went to them and looked, and looked, at


those swirling, shooting, looping patterns of fish, which always defied transcription to


paper until I hit upon the "unrelated" method. The result is in "An


Aquarium." I think the first thing which turned me in this direction was John Gould


Fletcher’s " London Excursion," in " Some Imagist Poets." I here


record my thanks.


For the substance of the poems—why, the poems are here. No one writing to-day can


fail to be affected by the great war raging in Europe at this time. We are too near it to


do more than touch upon it. But, obliquely, it is suggested in many of these poems, most


notably those in the section, "Bronze Tablets." The Napoleonic Era is an epic


subject, and waits a great epic poet. I have only been able to open a few windows upon it


here and there. But the scene from the windows is authentic, and the watcher has used


eyes, and ears, and heart, in watching.


Preface from Lowell’s Can Grande’s Castle


(New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918) vii-xvii.


THE four poems in this book are more closely related to one another than may at first


appear. They all owe their existence to the war, for I suppose that, had there been no


war, I should never have thought of them. They are scarcely war poems, in the strict sense


of the word, nor are they allegories in which the present is made to masquerade as the


past. Rather, they are the result of a vision thrown suddenly back upon remote events to


explain a strange and terrible reality. "Explain" is hardly the word, for to


explain the subtle causes which force men, once in so often, to attempt to break the


civilization they have been at pains to rear, and so oblige other, saner, men to oppose


them, is scarcely the province of poetry. Poetry works more deviously, but perhaps not


less conclusively.


It has frequently been asserted that an artist lives apart, that he must withdraw


himself from events and be somehow above and beyond them. To a certain degree this is


true, as withdrawal is usually an inherent quality of his nature, but to seek such a


withdrawal is both ridiculous and frustrating. For an artist to shut himself up in the


proverbial "ivory tower" and never look out of the window is merely a tacit


admission that it is his ancestors, not he, who possess the faculty of creation. This is


the real decadence: to see through the eyes of dead men. Yet to-day can never be


adequately expressed, largely because we are a part of it and only a part. For that reason


one is flung backwards to a time which is not thrown out of proportion by any personal


experience, and which on that very account lies extended in something like its proper


perspective.


Circumstances beget an interest in like circumstances, and a poet, suddenly finding


himself in the midst of war, turns naturally to the experiences of other men in other


wars. He discovers something which has always hitherto struck him as preposterous, that


life goes on in spite of war. That war itself is an expression of life, a barbaric


expression on one side calling for an heroic expression on the other. It is as if a door


in his brain crashed open and he looked into a distance of which he had heard but never


before seen. History has become life, and he stands aghast and exhilarated before it.


That is why I have chosen Mr. Aldington’s poem as a motto to this book. For it is


obvious that I cannot have experienced what I have here written. I must have got it from


books. But, living now, in the midst of events greater than these, the books have become


reality to me in a way that they never could have become before, and the stories I have


dug out of dusty volumes seem as actual as my own existence. I hope that a little of this


vividness may have got into the poems themselves, and so may reach my readers. Perhaps it


has been an impossible task, I can only say that I was compelled to attempt it.


The poems are written in "polyphonic prose," a form which has proved a


stumbling-block to many people. "Polyphonic prose" is perhaps a misleading


title, as it tends to make the layman think that this is a prose form. Nothing could be


farther from the truth. The word "prose" in its title simply refers to the


manner in which the words are printed; "polyphonic"—many-voiced—giving


the real key. "Polyphonic prose" is the freest, the most elastic, of all forms,


for it follows at will any, and all, of the rules which guide other forms. Metrical verse


has one set of laws, cadenced verse another; "polyphonic prose" can go from one


to the other in th

e same poem with no sense of incongruity. Its only touchstone is the


taste and feeling of its author.


Yet, like all other artistic forms, it has certain fundamental principles, and the


chief of these is an insistence on the absolute adequacy of the manner of a passage to the


thought it embodies. Taste is therefore its determining factor; taste and a rhythmic ear.


In the preface to "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed," I stated that I had found


the idea of the form in the works of the French poet, M. Paul Fort. But in adapting it for


use in English I was obliged to make so many changes that it may now be considered as


practically a new form. The greatest of these changes was in the matter of rhythm. M.


Fort’s practice consists, almost entirely, of regular verse passages interspersed with


regular prose passages. But a hint in one of his poems led me to believe that a closer


blending of the two types was desirable, and here at the very outset I met with a


difficulty. Every form of art must have a base; to depart satisfactorily from a rhythm it


is first necessary to have it. M. Fort found this basic rhythm in the alexandrine. But the


rhythm of the alexandrine is not one of the basic rhythms to an English ear. Altered from


syllables to accent, it becomes light, even frivolous, in texture. There appeared to be


only one basic rhythm for English serious verse: iambic pentameter, which, either rhymed


as in the "heroic couplet" or unrhymed as in "blank verse," seems the


chief foundation of English metre. It is so heavy and so marked, however, that it is a


difficult rhythm to depart from and go back to; therefore I at once discarded it for my


purpose.


Putting aside one rhythm of English prosody after another, I finally decided to base my


form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The variations permitted to this


cadence enable the poet to change the more readily into those of vers libre, or


even to take the regular beat of metre, should such a marked time seem advisable. It is,


of course, important that such changes should appear as not only adequate but necessary


when the poem is read aloud. And so I have found it. However puzzled a reader may be in


trying to apprehend with the eye a prose which is certainly not prose, I have never


noticed that an audience experiences the slightest confusion in hearing a "polyphonic


prose" poem read aloud. I admit that the typographical arrangement of this form is


far from perfect, but I have not as yet been able to hit upon a better. As all printing is


a mere matter of convention, however, I hope that people will soon learn to read it with


no more difficulty than a musician knows in reading a musical score.


So much for the vexed question of rhythm. Others of the many voices of "polyphonic


prose " are rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and return. Rhyme is employed to give a


richness of effect, to heighten the musical feeling of a passage, but it is employed in a


different way from that usual in metrical verse. For, although the poet may, indeed must,


employ rhyme, it is not done always, nor, for the most part, regularly. In other words,


the rhymes should seldom come at the ends of the cadences, unless such an effect be


especially desired. This use of rhyme has been another difficulty to readers. Seeing


rhymes, their minds have been compelled by their seeming strangeness to pull them,


Jack-Horner-like, out of the text and unduly notice them, to the detriment of the passage


in which they are embedded. Hearing them read without stress, they pass unobserved, merely


adding their quota of tonal colour to the whole.


Return in "polyphonic prose" is usually achieved by the recurrence of a


dominant thought or image, coming in irregularly and in varying words, but still giving


the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of as imperative in all poetry.


It will be seen, therefore, that "polyphonic prose" is, in a sense, an


orchestral form. Its tone is not merely single and melodic as is that of vers libre, for


instance, but contrapuntal and various. I have analyzed it here with some care because, as


all the poems in this volume are written in it, some knowledge of how to approach it is


necessary if one is to understand them. I trust, however, that my readers will speedily


forget matters of technique on turning to the poems themselves.


One thing more I wish to say in regard to "Guns as Keys: and the Great Gate


Swings." I should be exceedingly sorry if any part of this poem were misunderstood,


and so construed into an expression of discourtesy toward Japan. No such idea entered my


mind in writing it; in fact, the Japanese sections in the first part ‘were intended to


convey -quite the opposite meaning. I wanted to place in juxtaposition the delicacy and


artistic clarity of Japan and the artistic ignorance and gallant self-confidence of


America. Of course, each country must be supposed to have the faults of its virtues; if,


therefore, I have also opposed Oriental craft to Occidental bluff, I must beg indulgence.


I have tried to give a picture of two races at a moment when they were brought in


contact for the first time. Which of them has gained most by this meeting, it would be


difficult to say. The two episodes in the "Postlude" are facts, but they can


hardly epitomize the whole truth. Still they are striking, occurring as they did in the


same year. I owe the scene of the drowning of the young student in the Kegon waterfall to


the paper "Young Japan," by Seichi Naruse, which appeared in the "Seven


Arts" for April, 1917. The inscription on the tree I have copied word for word from


Mr. Naruse’s translation, and I wish here to express my thanks, not for his permission (as


with a perfect disregard of morals, I never asked it), but for his beautiful rendering of


the original Japanese. I trust that my appreciation will exonerate my theft.


From the Preface to Lowell’s John Keats


(New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925)


My intention in writing this book has been by no means to supplant existing


biographies, but to add to them, and this I hope will be clearly understood. I should not


have attempted a complete biography had it been possible to present all that I have


discovered in any other way, but the knowledge gained, spread as it is over the whole of


Keats’s life, could be properly understood only by placing it in a chronological


pattern.


This is my chief reason for writing the book; there was, however, another. It lay


simply in the passage of time. Many as are the books on Keats, their authors have


belonged, I think without exception, to the nineteenth century, in attitude if not in


fact. But a new generation of poets and critics now holds the stage, and the twentieth


century has been silent in regard to Keats. Yet a great poet has something to give to


every generation, and it has seemed to me time that mine should set down its impressions


and put its particular view on record. I do not pretend to speak as the universal voice of


an era, merely as one voice existing in that era; but this opinion has led me to add a


certain amount of criticism to the biography proper, which criticism will be considered


sympathetic or the reverse principally, I believe, according to whether the individual


reader derive his impressions from the mental impulses of the last century or of this.


Keats and his poetry are so much of a piece, that I have followed a rather unusual


method in dealing with the two aspects of his character, the personal and the poetic. I


have given his life as a whole, bringing in the poems at intervals as they occurred to


him. My object has been to make the reader feel as though he were living with Keats,


subject to the same influences that surrounded him, moving in his circle, watching the


advent of poems as from day to day they sprang into being. I have tired to bring back into


existence the place, the time, and the society in which Keats moved. A host of


commentators have dealt with him solely in his quality as a poet functioning in the


timeless area of universal literature; my endeavour has been to show him as a particular


poet, hindered and assisted by his temperamental bias as a man, writing in a certain milieu.


For this reason, I have considered that no detail which could add vividness to the picture


is unimportant, nothing which could clarify his psychological processes too slight to be


mentioned. Keats’s life was so short that it is possible to follow it with a


minuteness which could not be accorded to a poet who had lived the usual span of


man’s existence. (pp. vii-ix)

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