Books: Poetry

POLITICAL SELF-PORTRAIT—John Wheelwright—Bruce Humphries ($2.50).

“AND I WILL BE HEARD”—John Beecher—Privately Printed.

THE TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON—Lawrence Lee—Scribner ($ 1.50).

A deep-bitten protestant is a rebel in any language. America has seen many such: among the still memorable ones, Rev. John Wheelwright who, with his sister-in-law Anne Hutchinson, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for feeling good;* and Rev. Henry Ward Called Antinomianism by Puritan divines.

Beecher, who wrote his future wife, after graduating from his father’s theological seminary: “I cannot assent. What then? Preach I will, licensed or not. . . . Will you go with me into the wilderness?” Today the American wilderness sprouts populations instead of trees. But the protestant blood of the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright, the Rev. Mr. Beecher, and others like them, flows on unchanged—a bright, early-American, rebel red.

Wheelwright. A latter-day descendant of the Massachusetts exile—

Saint, whose name and business I bear

with me;

rebel New England’s rebel against dominion. . . .)

was John Wheelwright, who died (aged 43) last month. Harvard-man, architectural historian, Socialist, he was one of the most famous unheard-of poets in the U. S. Wheelwright’s reputation is based on several books of crankily learned, lyrically didactic verse. Political Self-Portrait, like its predecessors, is full of what seem like the antics of an annunciatory angel dancing on the top of a Harvard education. But that does not prevent the book from bringing its reader hard up against an incandescent, no-fooling poetical and political faith.

Poetry and politics do not seem like strangers to each other in Wheelwright’s book, because its author had no doubt whatever that political freedom and verbal truth are the interrelated objectives of every wide-awake, decent man on earth. Political Self-Portrait is a kind of rebel’s hornbook, full of references to the doctrines and deeds of those who Wheelwright felt have most signally helped—and hindered—truth-telling and liberty. On the angels’ side, among others, are Prometheus, Jesus Christ, and the old Rev. John. On the other side may be found Cain, Stalin and Archibald MacLeish.

Wheelwright’s verse makes hard, sometimes impenetrable, reading. His somewhat pampered, ingrown learning keeps cropping out in it like rocks in a hill field. Fortunately, he had the equipment of a nature poet, in a land where freedom is in the air rather than in books. His landscapes can be just right:

Flivvers herd fireflies down the sumac

slope;

the trees stir; the tides turn; the cloud

theater-curtain closes across the Moon

and a landward sea wind lifts over the

lawn,

with dancing leaves, the tilth that Spring

thaws lent the brine. . . .

And at that major spiritual crossroads where all true poets stand, Wheelwright can take his place:

There is no physic

for the world’s ill, nor surgery; it must

(hot smell of tar on wet salt air)

burn in a fever forever, an incense pierced

with arrows, whose name is Love and another

name

Rebellion. . . .

All Poetry to this not-to-be-looked-

upon sun

of Passion is the moon’s cupped light; all

Politics to this moon, a moon’s reflected

cupped light, like the moon of Rome, after

the deep wells of Grecian light sank low;

Always the enemy is the foe at home.

But these three are friends whose arms twine

without words ; as, in a still air,

the great grove leans to wind, past and to

come.

Beecher. A great-great-nephew of Henry Ward Beecher is John Beecher, who last spring found himself so burned up about current doings that he had to let off his steam in a free-verse pamphlet. Privately printed, not copyrighted, and with no rights reserved, it is written in the great American tradition of plain speech, is fittingly* titled “And I Will Be Heard.”

The first half of Beecher’s poem is made up of a series of portrait-sketches of his ancestral relatives—the blacksmith Beechers whose guns were held at present-arms when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown; Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom Lincoln called “the little lady who made the great war”; Henry Ward Beecher, who, on being handed his diploma at Amherst, was told by the college’s president, “Well, this is the last we shall hear of you, Mr. Beecher”; Thomas K. Beecher, who chose to be a small-town preacher:

There were seven denominations that had

churches in his town

and he wrote a book

“Our Seven Churches”

not knocking a single one

but saying they all

had something.

On his mother’s side of the family were the Goodwins, clipper ship captains from Newburyport; and Nathan Hale; and Edward Everett Hale, who wrote The Man Without A Country about a man who wanted to sell America out.

This man said

—”God damn the United States”

but God damned him instead.

Having thus established his historical identity, John Beecher sounds off on what he thinks of certain famous personages of his own times. What he says are things that probably a large majority of plain Americans have either themselves said, or are itching to say, about Henry Ford, Lindbergh, Hearst, John Lewis, William Green, Earl Browder and others. Beecher does not let his cons black out his pros in his protesting acceptance of the world as it is. But there is one world figure for whom he has absolutely no use: Hitler. “And I Will Be Heard” ends with a cordial assurance to the Führer that he will die, and that the U. S. will take over

the empire

you tried to found

but your idea

was death

and ours is life

and the thirteen bars in the American flag

will stay thirteen

but the forty eight stars will

multiply will get to

be from a constellation

a galaxy

because humanity

will join us.

Southern Rebel. South of what was once the Mason and Dixon border, rebellion has been mixed up traditionally with conservatism rather than with reform. Lawrence Lee is a Jeffersonian Southerner, an Alabaman who went north to Albemarle County, Va.—”the world’s one real county—in all the spiritual significance of that word”—where he studied at the University of Virginia, for a time was editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. A skillful writer of fastidious pastoral verse, Lee has been thinking about Thomas Jefferson for so long that some of that Virginia gentleman’s democratic magnanimity has finally come to roost in his poems.

It is this magnanimity that elevates The Tomb of Thomas Jefferson above the run of books by the many minor poets who can write Frosty or Horatian lyrics as well as Lee. Now & then, in his severely chaste magazine verse, a reader can hear a rumble that means business, as when he writes of the obelisk that marks Jefferson’s grave,

After the fallen leaf

So strict a form will show

Not all is brief

Not all unsure

Of what man’s mind may know,

His heart make pure.

At Lee’s best—which is implicit rather than fully achieved in his latest book—his poetry has the shapeliness and poise of a massive bell, from which a slowly swinging clapper booms out a message that all free men will understand.

Now over cloud-bright fields the wide

wings row

The passionless eddies of the air.

Peace bends with the man who labors far

below.

Climbs with the woman up the evening

stair.

For two the night is uncoiled with her hair

By starry hands that guide the ordering

comb.

The fatten slip, the falling gown show bare

The sculptured body in the sacred

room. . . .

For immortality our shapes are made.

Love is our secret work. From this let

grow

In morning rooms the tyrant’s overthrow,

And for his hate the spirit’s full noon glow.

Lee, Beecher and Wheelwright are poets of vastly different stripes but of the same cloth. Each is a product, and a proponent, of the great, unfinished American Rebellion. Each is trying to make the living god jibe with brass tacks.

*From Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s famed war cry: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”