Monday, Oct. 15, 1934
Arma Virumque
RIDERS OF THE SKY--Leighton Brewer--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).
THE WESTWARD STAR--Frank Ernest Hill--Day ($2.50).
MAN WITH A BULL-TONGUE PLOW-- Jesse Stuart--Dutton ($3).
Even as late as the 19th Century, serious poets believed in writing long epic poems. With some notable exceptions, modern poets generally have given themselves to voicing their own insulted and injured state. Thomas Stearns Eliot's epic of introspection, The Waste Land, has for years been considered the representative poem of the modern age. The Grand National for winged steeds has not been run for some time, but there are signs that poets may be tuning up their mounts for more than the usual private canter. Critics who hardly raised their eyes at Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body began to look alive when Archibald MacLeish's Conquistador appeared. Though Poets Brewer, Hill and Stuart will cause little commotion among the critics, to plain readers they will be a further indication that narrative verse is coming back, may be edging toward a real modern epic.
Such an epic could certainly be written about the airmen of the War. Poet Leighton Brewer has not done it, but he has shown the possibilities. A veteran of the U. S. Air Service in France, Poet Brewer sings a long paean to his old comrades of Tours, Issoudun and the Western Front. Riders of the Sky, "a combination of fact and fiction and legend," brings in many an actual person and event. Some of the characters: "Gil" Winant (now Governor of New Hampshire), Eddie Rickenbacker, the late Quentin Roosevelt, Frank Luke, "Hobey" Baker. Author Brewer's reference to himself among the catalog of heroes is modest:
And 'Laddie' Brewer who liked to go to bed At eight o'clock and as mess-officer Was hailed until a diet of canned crab Too oft repeated change of sentiment Provoked, and so another was elected.
Riders of the Sky contains mightier lines than these, but readers will be carried along rather than away by this narrative in reputedly blank verse.
Poet Frank Ernest Hill's The Westward Star, a narrative of covered-wagon days, points to another U.S. epic that has yet to be given definitive form. Poet Hill plucks his lyre with a surer hand. Though few would compare him with Homer, many would place him close to Masefield. A wagon train bound for the West, just before the days of the gold rush, comes safely through the central prairies, then divides, some for Oregon, some for the shorter but more dangerous trail to Cali fornia. To get her daughter Celeste away from Emmet, a rough-&-ready Westerner, her mother sees to it that they go in different directions. But luckily for the caravan, Emmet rejoins them later, guides them on their terrible journey through the mountains. In a hopeless attempt to save some who have been left behind. Emmet is frozen to death. Though Celeste makes no secret of the fact that she is carrying his child, her mother is reconciled: her trip has given her a broader view. As patriotic literature or red-blooded narrative The Westward Star is first-rate; as poetry it is not so bad.
Fellow-Poet Mark Van Doren hails Jesse Stuart as an "American Burns." Man with a Bull-Tongue Robert Plow, a collection of 703 sonnetesque verses, sings only homespun heroes, vaunts the excellences of Kentucky farmlife, mourns the mortality of Poet Stuart's love affairs and friends. No book to read through at a sitting, it will prove to the plainest reader that, in Poet Van Doren's words, Stuart is "a rare poet for these times . . . both copious and comprehensible." Some samples of his comprehensible copiosities: Where are the friends of youth I miss -- Elmer and Bert, Oscar, and Jim and John; . . . And where are Lizzie, Lute, and Jack and Mack! They, too, have gone and they will not come back.
A personal poet, Stuart often tells all:
I shall not go inside the church tonight. She must not see me stagger down the aisle.
But on Death muses his Muse most:
In winter when the ground was white with snow She sat beside the fire and knitted socks, But now her grave is marked with two field rocks. . . .
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