by Nils Peterson
I thought to myself that one day I’ll have to write an essay entitled “Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest.” It would have as its epigraph a quotation from Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, “But wit is of little use in the arts. To inhibit enthusiasm and to discredit genius, that is about all. What a paltry occupation, being a critic…. Music, music, music is what we want! Turning to the rhythm, swaying to the syntax, descending further into the cellars of the heart.” Yes, “swaying to the syntax,” poetry and music swaying in a dance – lovers really. This morning I thought this might be the day.
Poetry used to be popular. People read it all the time. Many newspapers had a daily poem. My mother wrote poems in both Swedish and English that appeared in a Swedish-American newspaper. Edgar Guest’s 1916 collection “A Heap o’ Livin” sold more than a million copies. But then in 1922 came the catastrophe of “The Wasteland,” and “real” poetry became the possession of the elite. Consequently, it gradually disappeared from newspapers and other general publications.
The title of Guest’s book came from a line in the title poem – “it takes a heap o’ livin’/ To make a house a home.” Some wit wrote “It takes a heap o’ heaping to make a heap a heap.” Well yes, funny. Dorothy Parker wrote “I’d rather flunk my Wasserman test/Than read a poem by Edgar Guest.” Witty, yes. Funny, no. Think how that attitude wants to separate those of us who love “The Wasteland” from the rest of the world who love a different kind of poetry.
A friend told me this story about his father: “My dad [at] a discussion in the big room at the Minnesota Men’s Conference.… (Once my brother and I coaxed our dad to come up for three days….) Robert Bly was asked about the meaning of a line in one of his poems… as he frequently was. In this instance… My dad leaned forward to listen… And Robert said ‘I have no idea what that means.’ That sealed the deal for my dad. He would much rather read Edgar Guest than some poet that doesn’t know what he means.”
Yes, sometimes it really is hard to say what a line means. Sometimes you don’t quite know yourself. Sometimes it would take too long to explain. Sometimes the place is not the right place for explanation. So, I sympathize with Robert, but I sympathize with my friend’s dad too.
Edgar Guest would never have such a problem because he never would have had such a question. You knew what he was saying. He was working hard to make it clear just as my mother did with her poems. Here’s the first stanza of the Home poem:
It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind,
An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.
It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be,
How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury;
It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything.
I ask you, isn’t what he’s saying here true? Not only true, but memorable. Someone once defined poetry as memorable speech. Well, here it is. He is using a kind of dialect to make sure he’s not driving off readers by sounding too high class. Too “elite.” Here are the last two stanzas:
Ye’ve got t’ weep t’ make it home, ye’ve got t’ sit an’ sigh
An’ watch beside a loved one’s bed, an’ know that Death is nigh;
An’ in the stillness o’ the night t’ see Death’s angel come,
An’ close the eyes o’ her that smiled, an’ leave her sweet voice dumb.
Fer these are scenes that grip the heart, an’ when yer tears are dried,
Ye find the home is dearer than it was, an’ sanctified;
An’ tuggin’ at ye always are the pleasant memories
O’ her that was an’ is no more—ye can’t escape from these.
Ye’ve got t’ sing an’ dance fer years, ye’ve got t’ romp an’ play,
An’ learn t’ love the things ye have by usin’ ’em each day;
Even the roses ’round the porch must blossom year by year
Afore they ’come a part o’ ye, suggestin’ someone dear
Who used t’ love ’em long ago, an’ trained ’em jes’ t’ run
The way they do, so’s they would get the early mornin’ sun;
Ye’ve got t’ love each brick an’ stone from cellar up t’ dome:
It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.
In “Speaking in Tongues: Where Pop Meets Modernism,” published in Slate on October 4, 2011, Robert Pinsky [former US Laureate] writes, “The ‘thumb-marks on the door’ the death’s angel, the roses in the last stanza: these are effective details, even though the opening exposition about ‘yer chairs an’ tables’ may be a bit repetitious and heavy. Guest is more willing to risk tedium than obscurity. In the concluding rhyme, ‘dome’ may be lunged-for, and in language like ‘these are scenes that grip the heart,’ Guest the literary man may be too visible behind his bucolic mask. But ‘Home’ is far from incompetent: the poem is an expert performance, and its onetime popularity is understandable.”
The language the critic uses may feel a little condescending, someone from the “Wasteland” world speaking down to us, but his judgment that the poem is “an expert performance” is right on.
P.S. I speak as a “Wasteland” lover. At 18, I tried to explain it to my American Lit prof. It had blown me away and I was not sure he was blown away enough. It is not the poem, but the sense that this is what a poem should be that infected the world for so long. Later, I was grateful for the “Beats” who in the same way as Eliot brought Greek and Sanskrit into his poem brought movies, and comic strips, good noise, and meditation into their poetry though in a few years their work would need as many footnotes as Eliot’s. Of course there were other champions of the non-Wasteland way along the way.
P.P.S. Here’s the start of a poem that shows Guest expects his audience to have had some acquaintance with Shakespeare:
The Bachelor’s Soliloquy
To wed, or not to wed; that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The bills and house rent of a wedded fortune,
Or to say “nit” when she proposes,
And by declining cut her. To wed; to smoke
No more….
[Is he slyly referring in an Eliotian way to Kipling’s poem about a man who must choose between a woman and cigars? It ends “And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke”?]
P.P.P.S. Clearly this has turned into an essay suitable for the editorial page.