Candle and the flame : poems / by George Sylvester Viereck [electronic text]

II

THIS, in all likelihood, will be my last book of verse. I no longer worship Beauty. Art for art's sake seems a jest, literature only a sickly mirage of life. My temperament is more dynamic than aesthetic. Activity, as such, allures me. Brooklyn Bridge seems to me a far more marvellous accomplishment than the most precious of sonnets. If I were not Viereck, I would gladly be Edison.

I sometimes suspect that I would rather have reared the Metropolitan Building than written my poem "Queen Lilith." The spirit of America has eaten into my heart. Wall Street is more interesting to me than Parnassus. The protagonists of great industrial combinations impress me more than the Knights of King Arthur's Table or the vassals of Beowulf. Yet we cannot extol the Standard Oil Company in blank verse nor encompass in a series of sonnets the exploits of J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan himself, so I am told, was a poet before finance enthralled him. Poetry, being the child of tradition, must necessarily lag behind the times at least by a century. We must write of the new in terms of the old, even if our work be surcharged with novel ideas, because the new terms have not yet acquired the connotative poetic values which, like certain rare mosses, take decades for their growth. The poet of the year two thousand will be able to write the poetry of to-day. The year three thousand may see the history of Rockefeller and Morgan embedded in heroic hexameters.

We can press forward only so far as the limitations of lyric art and our own limitations permit. Our accents, however, will ever wax in resonance through the ages if we dwell on those themes which cannot grow stale while the race draws breath: metaphysical truths, elemental passions, and elemental satieties. In this book I pass from the physics to the metaphysics of passion. Conservative though I be in business and politics, I shall never be a moralist in art. My work is unconventional because conventions mean ever less to me the more I vibrate to the heart-beats of life itself.

I find it difficult, for instance, to write a play because the basic conflicts of conventional drama have ceased to interest me. My own emotions are too elusive and too complex to be capable of expression or understanding beyond where I have gone. If I lived in Europe, if mine were the freedom of Wedekind and the audience that hails him and goads him, I might still go on. But I realize that I am too far ahead of the pageant of American life to go one step further. I have reached an Ultima Thule. Seated by the roadside, I shall wait for America to catch up, dividing my time, perchance, between love and the ticker.

America forces its poets to deny poetry or leave the country! Henry James chose exile, J. Pierpont Morgan diverted his imaginative powers into the channels of high finance. Stedman, attempting a compromise, was distinctly minor both as a banker and as a poet. George Santayana fled to the cloister of his own mind, Poe to drink, Markham to book reviews. Roosevelt, the most poetical personality of the modern world, turned to politics, Whitman to sociology, Moody to melodrama, Woodberry and Van Dyke to the schoolroom, while the tentacles of the Standard Oil encircled the poet's soul of J. I. C. Clarke. Huneker's muse abandoned inspiration for criticism. The newspaper swallowed Bert Taylor and William Marion Reedy, while Michael Monahan harks to seductive voices not Pierian. But the torch of our lyric fire still burns and will continue to burn when it has passed from my hands into those of a younger poet.