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

I

THE modern Muse finds herself in the same position as woman: she must divorce herself from sentimentalism without graduating into a spectacled and hyper-cerebral old maid. She must reaffirm herself intellectually, without sacrificing her sensuous appeal. Phryne is preferable to a New England spinster, but Aspasia is more desirable than Phryne. The brain thirsts for ideas, the ear thirsts for music. Both must be satisfied. Unfortunately the seductions of sound in poetry often distract attention from the intellectual content. We are compelled to emphasize the ideational values in our work if the world shall not relegate lyric verse to the nursery, a plaything for children and idiots. The salvation of poetry depends on the recognition of its philosophical message, just as the triumph of woman suffrage will not be ultimately assured until the world realizes that behind the ivory of Aphrodite's forehead there may be hidden a brain that could challenge Darwin and Bismarck. We must rehabilitate poetry as Shaw has rehabilitated the drama. We must apply Shavian methods to lyric and ballad. I have found myself as a poet. To help others to find me, I have added a commentary.

My commentary, in the shape of marginal notes, will be found in the back of this volume. Those who wish to linger with me after reading the poems may turn to my notes at their leisure. Far be it from me to discourage future commentators from independent investigation. My remarks are suggestive, not final. If our palace of song is worth the rearing, we must build better than we know, because we draw strength and matter from our racial conscience and from world memories slumbering unbeknown of us in the caverns of our brain. But we may give a clue now and then which can direct the mind of the reader and perhaps prevent critics yet unborn from wasting marvellously ingenious devices upon the erection of spurious pyramids on the base of a fatal misprint or a mistaken assumption. Neither Goethe, nor Shakespeare, it may be urged, was his own commentator. The resultant loss, however, was both theirs and the world's. What would we not give to-day for an authentic key to "Faust II" or to Shakespeare's "Sonnets"?