Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

nor that she substituted assonance for rhyme; nor even that she occasionallyfailed to rhyme at all (that practice he had accepted in Walt Whitman, whosework he recommended to her reading); but that all these irregularities werecombined and deeply embedded in the most conventional of all verse forms.At this distance we can venture to reconstruct her struggles. A newtide had entered her being; she now wished to say with passion what shehad been hitherto saying playfully, saying with coquetry. New intensities—particularly in new countries—called for new forms. A childhood fixation,however, prevented her from abandoning the stanzaic patterns for herearly reading. She revolted from the regular rhyme, the eternal “my–die”and God–rod,” not because she was too lazy to impose it, but because theregular rhyme seemed the outer expression of an inner conventionality. Shecalled the regular rhyme “prose—they shut me up in prose”—and in thesame poem she called it “captivity.”One of her devices shows us how conscious she was of what shewas doing. She artfully offers us rhymes of increasing regularity so thatour ear will be waiting for another, and then in a concluding verse refusesany rhyme whatever. The poem “Of Tribulation These Are They” gives us“white–designate,” “times–palms,” “soil–mile,” “road–Saved!” (The italicsare hers.) The effect is as of a ceiling being removed from above our heads.The incommensurable invades the poem. In “I’ll Tell Thee All—How BlankIt Grew,” she flings all the windows open in closing with the words “outvisionsparadise,” rhymeless after three stanzas of unusually regular rhymes.Her “teacher” rebuked her for these audacities, but she persistedin them. She did not stoop to explain or defend them. The Colonel’s unwillingnessto publish the work showed her that he did not consider her apoet, however much he may have been struck by individual phrases. Shecontinued to enclose an occasional poem in her letters to friends, but theyseem not to have asked to see “lots of them.” The hope of encouragementand the thought of a contemporary audience grew more and more remote.Yet the possibility of a literary fame, of an ultimate glory, never ceased totrouble her. In poem after poem she derided renown; she compared it to anauction and to the croaking of frogs; but at the same time she hailed it asthis consecration of the poet’s “vital light.” What did she do about it? Shetook five steps forward and two steps back. It is no inconsiderable advancetoward literary pretension to write two thousand poems; yet the condition inwhich she left them is a no less conspicuous retreat. She called on posterity towitness that she was indifferent to its approval, but she did not destroy herwork. She did not even destroy the “sweepings of the studio,” the tentativesketches at the margin of the table. Had she left fair copies, the movement224