COOL TOMBS When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs. Pocahontas body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs? ... Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers. . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust in the cool tombs. LOAM In the loam we sleep, In the cool moist loam, To the lull of years that pass From the loam, then, The soft warm loam, We rise: To shape of rose leaf, We stand, then, To a whiff of life, Lifted to the silver of the sun Over and out of the loam A day. Carl Sandburg Carl Sandburg Brother Tree: IDEALISTS Why do you reach and reach? do you dream some day to touch the sky? Brother Stream: Why do you run and run? do you dream some day to fill the sea? Brother Bird: Why do you sing and sing? do you dream— HOW POEMS ARE MADE "Si'l fait beau temps," Disait un papillon volage, "S'il fait beau temps, Je vais folâtrer dans les champs." "Et moi," lui dit l'abeille sage, More than half of the people who think about poetry prefer to believe that the poet, like the butterfly, flutters gaily in the sunlight and sips honey. They like to think that because he is fed on the honey of inspiration his wings are glorious in flight. But poets themselves, and those who know most about them, tell us that they are as devout in labor as the proverbial bee. And unless poetry is a thing by itself, utterly unlike the other great arts, unlike music, sculpture, architecture, the dance, the drama, it is reasonable to suppose that labor must be a part of a poet's life and that there must be a travail before beauty is born. Yet these two theories, which we may as well call the butterfly theory and the bee theory, are not necessarily irreconcilable. A poet does live creatively by virtue of inspiration. But inspiration is not a thing peculiar to poets. All mankind knows inspiration, and if it did not belong as truly to the housewife and the bricklayer and the stockbroker as to the poet, poets would have no understanding audience. But a poet is a poet by reason of his ability to do with inspiration what these others can not do with it or can not do so well. It is the poet who makes the delicate cell, the poem, in which the honey of inspiration is stored, to be a joy for all in the days when no flowers blossom and the world is dour and cold. That he may know how to make that cell the poet must work! But fortunately, there are many ways of working, and sooner or later each poet finds his own best way. Some poets brood over poems a long time before they ever set down a word on paper, and then, when it is once set down, make very few changes. This is what Sara Teasdale does. And it is a method of work common to many makers of the best short lyrics. It is a difficult method for poets whose days are full of other things than poetry, for there is always the danger of losing the poem. But to hold a poem in the mind and let it grow there is a fine and natural way of making it. Other poets write rapidly and make few alterations, but they write many, many poems which they regard only as practice-work and throw away. When they are content they give the poem to the public, but not otherwise. Such poets must have a well-developed critical faculty and must be able to choose wisely from their own works the things that are best. Robert Frost works in this way and seldom gives the world a poem which the world is not glad to receive. Still other poets write in the first flush of inspiration and then revise again and again until the perfect poem emerges out of a chaos of self-expression. Vachel Lindsay works in this way. He sometimes re-writes his long poems thirty or forty times. And finally, there are poets who write very slowly and revise with great care. Such a poet is Carl Sandburg, a master of concise human speech. Moreover, the fact that a great poet can write a masterpiece as John Masefield wrote his "Cargoes," in a few minutes one Sunday morning, should not lead any young poets to accept the butterfly theory of poetry. When Mr. Masefield achieved that miracle he was already a master poet. The masters can all do things that can not be done by the pupils, by beginners. They have learned their craft. When the idea comes, when the keen emotion is felt, when they have found inspiration, they are ready. They are amply equipped for the task of giving form to idea and mood and inspiration. And, moreover, in one way or another, the masters have earned that equipment by hard work. They have learned what they know. They have taught them selves how to do what they have done. Every poet, whether he realizes it or not (and often he does not realize it), has lived through what may be called a "vocational education." The more we learn about the lives of poets the more certain we are that this is true. Fortunately very few poets were ever self-conscious about this vocational education. Very few have "taken courses" in the hope of learning "how to be poets." That would be almost criminal! But, if we could investigate, we should be likely to find out that nearly all good poets began, in childhood or early youth, to do certain things of their own volition and for their own satisfaction that were of undoubted value in preparation for poethood. Perhaps the poet-child showed a keen zest for rhythm and a marked desire to experiment with rhythmical tunes. Perhaps he loved to dance or to move his hands in time to the rhythm of music, or to watch the movement of great machines and attempt to count the time and give the stresses by tapping, or perhaps he even attempted to tap the staccato rhythms of a strongly accented bit of conversation. Perhaps his sense of rhythm was pleased by certain forms of athletic play and perhaps he tried to translate these rhythms into words. All of these ways of playing with rhythmical tunes might justly be called a work of preparation for the making of poems. One poet, Margaret Widdemer, tells me that when she was a little girl she would go all alone into her grandmother's big parlor and dance there, without music, for sheer delight in the rhythms she could make. Later came a more self-conscious preparation for the life of a poet. The poet-child began to write poems. He would set down on a piece of paper his rhymes and rhythms and ideas and emotions. And he would gloat over these effusions in secret. When he had just written a poem he probably thought it the finest poem in the world. A few days, a few weeks, or a few months later he would be in despair about it. Then he would write another. Sometimes he would solemnly vow by Apollo and all |