Two Poets on the East Side
Alter Brody, The Family Album. B. W. HUEBSCH. ($1.25.)Lola Ridge, The Ghetto, and other Poems. B. W. HUEBSCH. ($1.25.)
I remember reading in a North-European legend of a king who had two favorite castles, one of which he occupied in winter and one in summer. When he was assured by the royal physician that he was about to die the monarch enjoined his Chancellor to have him removed quickly to his summer castle. “But it is December,” protested the Chancellor; “the frost lies heavily on the earth and the walls of the castle are of glass overlooking a stormy sea.” His majesty replied: “Alas, I am not dying alone; else I would seek a warm refuge for my worn out bones. But with me die a host of dear dreams and fancies—they will never forgive me if I fail to take them home for the last time.” And this legend recalls a sentence the source of which I cannot trace: “Men revere only the things of love and light; and the last men in the hurricane of universal destruction will leave their goods behind them and rush frantically to those places where the greatest human love was enacted.” All discussions of poetry, endless though they seem to be, almost blindly pass by those elements which make poetry the summer house of man’s fancy and the refuge of his fugitive despair. And not the critics alone do these things elude, the poets, our poets, alas, have quite different ends in view. Most of our American muses pass the Uranian year in the winter castle of intellectualism, while the rest content themselves with a high chair in the Coney Island of free verse.
They forget, our poets and critics, that there is a subtle economy in man’s meddlings with poetry. For it is one art which certainly is not useless. Poetry has many very practical uses. But we need confine ourselves here to only two of them, the most important I think. (1) Poetry by restraining and modifying our pronunciation of words, acts as the pulse of our conversation. In other words, English poetry is the musical formula according to which the English-speaking races converse. And I maintain that if we suddenly. stopped reading the even melodious meters of English poetry, the words we use to designate even the commonest objects would become quite unutterable. Like a body which has ceased to pulse, our conversation would die out. (2) Poetry frames for us pleasingly the common images of life so that they become quite settled in our minds as objects worthy of our attention. Beneath our reading of ‘ poetry there is the same logic which prompts us to hang certain pictures on the walls of our homes.
+ The poets I have before me for review have abandoned the first of these functions entirely. Like a host of their contemporaries they claim no kinship with the old English meters and rhythms. And in the application of the second function certainly Alter Brody has been the more successful of the two. His volume, teeming with memories of his old Russian-Jewish town, and abounding with sincere, thoroughly felt impressions of the life about him on the Jewish East Side, will be counted, among the most interesting published this year.
Alter Brody's poems are all of them very human with a charming whimsicality. I had
LAMENTATIONS
the privilege of seeing most of the manuscript before a publisher was found for it, and the pleasure I had in first reading of it has only been increased by a reading of the same poems in book form. The impression I get reading Brody’s poetry is that he has paused and gazed earnestly and clearly where all of us have rushed by. The best poems in the book to my mind are “A Family Album,” “In the Circulating Library Seward Park,” “The Neurolo- gical Institute,” “Ghetto Twilight,” “My Love,” and “Lamentations,” which I reproduce because it shows Brody at his best and at his worst.
In a dingy kitchen Facing a Ghetto backyard . An‘old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations, Quaveringly, Out of a Hebrew Bible. The gaslight flares and falls. . . . This night, Two thousand years ago, Jerusalem fell and the Temple was burned. Tonight This white-haired Jewess Sits in her kitchen and chants—by the banks of the Hudson— The Lament of the Prophet. The gaslight flares and falls. . . .
Nearby, Locked in her room, Her daughter lies on a bed convulsively sobbing. Her face is dug in the pillows; Her shoulders heave with her sobs— The bits of a photograph lie on the dresser, . . . Now the picture Mr. Brody draws is complete. The emotional analogy he conceived he has fairly compelled. Yet the poem is constructed on a flimsy basis, it fairly totters on every line. It certainly does not settle in the memory, and if it does it does not clutch our minds with those sure tentacles with which a poem in the old rhythms and meters seizes us. This poem shows also how little the poet has thought about the life of his people. To anyone informed fully with the sentiments of the Jews the comparison of the grief of a jilted girl with the grief of the race at the destruction of the Temple is plain amorutzis. This is one of Brody’s most characteristic weaknesses—his utter ignorance of the sources of life about him. Every genuine poet is also a good deal of a statesman, and the better his poetry the clearer is his sense of time, place, and motive. Brody’s approach to his own people is that of a third-rate poet. What is genuine in Alter Brody’s poetry is not at all lyrical; it strikes me as material rather, for good prose sketches. Written in sturdy narrative prose style it might make a series of sketches of New York resembling Tom Burke’s sketches of London. In fact after reading through Brody’s poems I again opened a Tom Burke’s book and made a comparison of the two, first by rewriting a few of Brody’s verses into prose paragraphs (Atlantic
Monthly did that with one of his poems last year) and then by resolving some of Burke's stuff into vers libre. I have reproduced the result of my refreshment with Brody, though the result of trying to make vers libre out of Tom Burke was so dismal I shall not impose it on the reader.
FROM THE JERSEY BANK(Brody's Vers Libre)
WEAaRILY, The River stretches its broad breast, Northward and southward, Dozing between its banks. Ferries, Lone-funneled and ugly Furrow its blue surface constantly— Sending up black streamers of smoke against the hazy sky Glowing with the last colours of the sunset. Tug-boats With engines incessantly clicking, Ply busily up and down— Dragging the long, heavy barges behind them. Occasionally Stately liners pass royally among them, Three-funneled and huge, Challenging the tall towers on the opposite shore. . . But the River ignores them all, Flowing slowly between the tall towers on one side and the tall crags on the other— Slowly, moodily, reluctantly, Into the far-off, inevitable Sea.
FROM THE JERSEY BANK
(As It Would Read in Simple Prose) “Wearily the river stretches its broad breast Nor:hward and Southward, dozing between its banks. Ferries lone funneled and ugly furrow its blue surface constantly—sending up black streamers of smoke against the hazy sky glowing with the last colors of the sunset. Tug- boats with engines incessantly clicking, ply busily up and down—dragging the long, heavy barges behind them, three funneled and huge, challenging the tall towers on one side and the tall crags on the other—slowly. moodily, reluctantly, into the far-off inevitable Sea.” I do not want to argue that this is the best sort of prose—it is not nearly as lyrical prose as Tom Burke’s “London Nocturnal.” But I believe the writing 6068 gain in dignity and effectiveness by being returned to that form of expression which is the natural receptacle of that sort of inspiration. Lola Ridge shares with Alter Brody a lack of information about the Jews of the East Side. The long title poem (The Ghetto) appeared in The New Republic a few months ago, where it made interesting reading matter. I have found it not difficult to reread under the quaint hard cover which Mr. Huebsch has drawn over it. But the whole poem strikes me as a gross misconception. Hester Street is not a part of the Ghetto. There is no Ghetto in America. What once bore a faint resemblance to a ghetto has disappeared out of the East Side during the last ten years; and now East Broadway and the Lithuanian and Galician colonies which cluster about it are thor- cuchly American. Indeed. in their Jewish way. the Jews of the East Side have out-Amer- icaned the Americans. Our Grand Street show