This isn't exactly what happened to poetry. Poetry didn't die. But Swinburne did drive his two-wheeled rhyme-spreader wagon all over the nineteenth century, and by the end of it he had gone back and forth and back and forth with his stanzas and his quatrains and his couplets and his lyrics and his parodies and everything else. It seemed like every word in English that could be rhymed in some melodious way he had rhymed. Some of the words, like "sea" and "rain," he'd rhymed hundreds of times. Rhyme words can't be used up, but even so, this was too much.
It took Alan years to get his grass back. Only this year is it again looking green and almost perfect. Poetry is still recovering from Swinburne.
I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE with a tray that came from an order of Chinese food in front of me-clean-on which tiny beads rolled around. I tied a knot in the jeweler's wire. It's made of very fine wire threads woven together somehow so that it doesn't kink the way real wire does, but it's very strong.
I started to bead. The verb made sense. I was beading. What you do is pick up a bead and turn it for a while between the huge clumsy pillows of your good finger and your thumb, looking for the hole. You turn it until the shadow of the hole, or the light appearing through the hole, comes into view, and then you know where to insert the end of the wire. As soon as it's on, you lose interest in it and let it slip down and away, and you're on to the next one. Revising is difficult.
What I thought about was piecework. About the people who begin a set of beads, and then count, and are in the middle, and then they're done, and they pick up another string and start again. What kind of life would that be? Not bad as long as you weren't too rushed. I could string beads for a living. I kept thinking of the phrase "beads on a string."
The necklace got longer until finally I thought it might be long enough and I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn't look good, and it was still too short for Roz, who looks best with a medium length of beads. So I added another two quatrains, and then I started to get the feeling that I'd reached the end-a feeling I know from writing. I looped the thread through the magnet clasp, and then back through the crimping bead, and I took the pliers and crimped hard and cut off the extra thread. When they were done I put them in tissue paper and wrapped them, and I had a present ready for Roz. But I didn't know if I should give it to her.
I'M STILL PACKING UP my anthologies. Here's another one- Bullen's Shorter Elizabethan Poems. It's blue and heavy and dusty. Anthologies should be blue, I think. Although I love the anthology by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, The Rattle Bag. It's green with the "ff" of the Faber logo all over it. The Staying Alive anthology is brown, and it has a girl's face on the cover. It's probably the best anthology that is mostly unrhyme. In fact, Staying Alive may be the best poetry anthology ever.
I bought Shorter Elizabethan Poems for twelve dollars from a used-book store in Portsmouth. The first song-a.k.a. poem-in it is by William Byrd, the lute player, from 1588, and I think it's probably the song that Ted Roethke had turning around in his head when he wrote his villanelle, the one that starts "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow." William Byrd says: "I kiss not where I wish to kill, / I fain not love, where most I hate, / I break no sleep to win my will."
Do you notice those one-syllable words? The Elizabethans really understood short words. Each one-syllable word becomes a heavy, blunt chunk of butter that is melted and baked into the pound cake of the line. The first essay on how to write poems in English came out in 1587, by George Gascoigne. Gascoigne said that to write a delectable poem you must "thrust as few words of many syllables into your verse as may be." The more monosyllables, the better, he said. Roethke learned that lesson, as had Tennyson and Leonie Adams and lots of other people. One time Roethke danced around the room saying, "I'm the best god-damned poet in the USA!"
Here's another odd anthology I own: The Poet's Tongue. It's brown, not blue, and it's edited by W. H. Auden and John Garrett. It's interestingly arranged. The names of the poets don't appear with their poems. Everything's quoted anonymously. The only way you find out who wrote what is by looking up the numbers in the table of contents. At first this is slightly irritating, but then it becomes freeing. The Poet's Tongue was published in 1935 in England, and most of the bookstores in New York didn't have a copy for sale. But the Holiday Bookshop, on East Forty-ninth Street, did.
I know this because 1935 was the year that Louise Bogan and Ted Roethke had their long-shadowed love affair. Ted Roethke was younger than she was-very eager and ambitious. Louise Bogan was an established New York person, who'd worked at Brentano's bookstore. Who'd struggled. She didn't have a whole lot of money. She reviewed poems for The New Yorker, and I think she also helped them pick which poems to publish, too. She'd been married, she was no longer married, and she was prone to fits of depression, bouts of drinking, all the usual ills.
And Roethke impressed her as a poet of talent-"slight but unmistakable," she said. Moreover, they found that they really liked each other. So they had their lost weekend together, drinking quarts of liquor and doing every wild fucky thing that you can imagine that two manic-depressive poets might do. And she bloomed, as she said to her arguing-buddy Edmund Wilson, not like any old rosebush, but like a Persian rosebush.
Afterward she wrote an affectionate letter to Roethke. She was fonder of him than she wanted to allow herself to be. She knew he was too young for her, and she also knew, because she was a sensible and observant woman, that he was mentally ill, and selfish in that ambitious smart-boy way, and that he was even more of a ransacker of liquor lockers than she was, and that he was any number of things that would make him impossible to live with. But she still had fond feelings.
What she said was that she'd been paid $7.50 by The New Yorker for a poem that she'd written, called "Baroque Comment." Not seventy-five dollars-seven dollars and fifty cents. This is the middle of the Depression. And then she said-and this is why I love Louise Bogan-then she said exactly what she spent the money on.
She bought three things: a bar of soap, a new fountain pen, and a bottle of whiskey. And then she still had two dollars and fifty cents left over, after buying those three things- the pen to write poems with, the bottle of whiskey to drink in order to write the poems, and the soap in order to take on the world as a newly clean, thinking, feeling poet. She weighs whether she should buy some fancy food, but no: she remembers a certain recently published anthology that she's heard good things about. An anthology edited by Auden and Garrett, The Poet's Tongue. So she rushes over to the Holiday Bookshop. "And I bought the damn thing," she says. And she writes some of her best poems after this point. Including the first stanza of "Roman Fountain." This is probably the best, happiest moment of her poetic life, right here, while she's writing the letter to Ted Roethke, knowing she's got new poems waiting inside her.
In fact the letter may be better than any poem she wrote, though she wrote some good ones. But we wouldn't be interested in reading the letter unless she'd written the poems. So once again it's terribly confusing. You need the art in order to love the life.