New York Letter

ALLAN ROSS MacDOUGALL

(The Poetry Society of America Meets and I Attend, Taking with Me a Sense of Humor.)

There is, in this city, a Poetry Society. Once a month they gather together at a handsome club to talk and be talked to. Once a year they foregather at a grand hotel for a handsome dinner and some more talk.

I am inquisitive, God help me! He and good training have made me so. To gratify my curiosity concerning the makers of American poetry, I asked Master Witter Bynner, one of their band, to take me to their monthly meeting at the National Arts Club. I ache still from suppressed laughter. (Dear sense of humor, what would I do without you when I visit the habitations of the pretentious and the congregation of the hum-bugs?)

It is the custom of this body of—of—the word I want will come to me later. It is their custom, I say, to ask for unpublished verse to be read aloud to the assemblage. The reader of the evening was Witter Bynner. Now Mr Bynner is a poet with a fine, vibrant voice and a rare appreciation for pause and effect, but when he read the verse of those anonymous poets such feeling did he put into them that his legs quivered and showed great emotion. That distressed and distracted me.

After each poem was read it was criticized by the audience. Criticism of a certain type is the easiest thing in the world. That type, that petty, empty, wordy type, was present in all its glory. Its chief exponent was one Shaemas O’Sheel, a wordy fellow loving the sound of his own voice and giving vent to many empty phrases with much gusto and argumentative fervor. Mr O’Sheel once wrote and had published in a book this plaintive thing:

Echo answers, Wherefor?

Another fellow who fancied himself as critic was a youth named Joyce Kilmer. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is the author of charming conceits, in verse, on trees and delicatessen stores. He has also written some sweet roundels and ballades. Incidentally he is a member of the staff of The New York Times. Occasionally he makes excursions to Women’s Clubs and other intellectual organizations to tell them all he knows about poetry. God save him! And God save me from ever hearing another night of such criticism from ponderous youths and knowing old maids!

After the reading of the poems, and the stupid remarks that followed the reading, there came what was called the “social intermission”. During this time insipid punch and silly little biscuits were served to as many of the mob as could grab them, and a noise as of a host of parrots in a small place filled the room. (Curious what bad punch will do to good, respectable people!) Following the excitement of the jabber and the near-wine the audience settled down to be sobered up by the reading of two seeming epics by Cale Young Rice. Mr Rice is dull—oh, very dull he is. Not only so, but his verse is—I won’t say; and he reads it with the voice of the spirit of a one-time virtuous Methodist minister chanting a prayer in the coolest part of Hell.

So he read his dreary interminable poems. So I had visions of all the precious Sundays my Presbyterian parents had forced me to waste. That vision passed and I still heard the whining drone. Back to my mind again where I had vicious thoughts of the tortures I would like to play upon bad poets who write bad verse and read it with bad accent and bad voice to good harmless people. By the time I had thought out and perfected a most amazing and subtle form of torture for such disturbers of human happiness, the dismal noise had stopped. Some day....

After the effort of the Rice man, Laurence Houseman read some of his fanciful poems. They were welcome. A Spring wind among the reeds after a prolonged dull thaw.

Poetry flourishes in America.

The poets are paid well by the Magazines; and strange women dine and wine them and pay them sweet homage.

The majority own and sport dress suits. They are eminently decent and respectable.

Poetry readings are now a well-attended form of afternoon time-killing.

Poetry flourishes.

THE PASSING OF FORBES-ROBERTSON

The stops are in. The organ is closed. For forty years it has “discoursed much excellent sweet music.” Now the organist is weary, and would fain rest. He has played many things and played them well. A gentle sweet melody like Mice and Men was made more sweet by his playing; and even if he did sometimes play a popular tune like The Third Floor Back were we not the more thrilled and moved when we heard the beauty of his playing of the symphony of Hamlet?

On Saturday, April 22, I watched, now from the wings, now from a side box, the last public performance of this artist’s Hamlet. Oh that I could write as well as I feel; that my words had the strength and the bursting keenness of my emotions. Then might I tell something.

Have you seen the sudden brilliant leap of a flame sometimes before it finally goes out? There was the same sort of spurt in that past performance. I had seen Robertson play Hamlet a year ago; in Brooklyn a week before I had watched him wearily play his part, and by the comparison I understood the effort involved in the brilliancy of his playing that day. There was a heart-bursting poignancy about his swan song. I cried with the Queen: “Oh Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!” And when at the end of it all he sat there on the throne of Denmark with that unforgettable look, purged from all the suffering and weariness; and when they bore him off to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Dead March, what could a feeling mortal do but—but—I cannot tell what I did.