第11章 Lanier's Poetry: Its Style(2)

As we have already seen, Lanier sometimes fails in clearness, or, more precisely, in simplicity.This comes partly from infelicitous sentence-construction, partly, perhaps, from Lanier's extraordinary musical endowment, but chiefly, I think, from over-luxuriance of imagination.But this occasional defect has been unduly exaggerated.Thus Mr.Gosse1 declares that Lanier is "never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza," -- a statement so clearly hyperbolic as hardly to call for notice.As a matter of fact, Lanier has written numerous poems that offer little or no difficulty to the reader of average intelligence, as `Life and Song', `My Springs', `The Symphony', `The Mocking-Bird', `The Song of the Chattahoochee', `The Waving of the Corn', `The Revenge of Hamish', `Remonstrance', `A Ballad of Trees and the Master', etc.More than this, Lanier at times manifests the simplicity that is granted only to genius of the highest order: thus an English critic,2who by the way declares that Lanier's volume has more of genius than all the poems of Poe, or Longfellow, or Lowell (the humorous poems excepted), and who considers Lanier the most original of all American poets, and more original than any England has produced for the last thirty years, says that "nothing can be more perfect than --`The whole sweet round Of littles that large life compound,'"3lines in `My Springs', and that "the touch of wonder in the last two lines,`I marvel that God made you mine, For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine,'4is as simple and exquisite as any touch of tenderness in our literature."I frankly admit that several of Lanier's best poems, as `Corn', `The Marshes of Glynn', and `Sunrise', are not simple;but the same thing is true of Milton's `Paradise Lost' and of Browning's `The Ring and the Book', and yet this fact does not exclude these two works from the list of great poems.Mr.Gosse, however, declares that `Corn', `Sunrise', and `The Marshes of Glynn' "simulate poetic expression with extraordinary skill.But of the real thing, of the genuine traditional article, not a trace"! What do these poems show, then?

Mr.Gosse answers: "I find a painful effort, a strain and rage, the most prominent qualities in everything he wrote;" which strikes me as the reverse of the facts.In one of his letters5 to Judge Bleckley, Lanier wrote this sentence: "My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache, purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." If, then, he committed an error (and I am far from considering him faultless), it was not that he beat and spurred on Pegasus, but that he failed to rein him in.Still, I repeat that I prefer the embarrassment of riches to the embarrassment of poverty.Finally, just as Milton tells us that the music of the spheres is not to be heard by the gross, unpurged ear, so I believe that many intelligent ears and eyes are at first too gross to hear and see what Lanier puts before them, whereas a bit of patient listening and looking reveals delights hitherto undreamed of.

1 See `Bibliography'.

2 `The Spectator' (London); see `Bibliography'.

3 `My Springs', ll.49-50.

4 `My Springs', ll.55-56.

5 It is to be hoped that these letters may yet be published.

I quote from one dated November 15, 1874.