CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE POET

Not a few of his readers feel that Chesterton’s chief bid to fame is his poetry. Alfred Noyes, for instance, writes the author,

“Chesterton led one of the most original lives of his day in Europe. It is well to remember this when it is suggested that men who avail themselves of the rich experiences of the centuries are merely echoes of the past. The true originality does not consist in inventing ideas that have no relation to truth and no roots in reality, but in the discovery and unveiling of something that has always been there, though we may hitherto have lacked the eyes to see it, or the power to express and interpret it. Chesterton had an expert gift for making one see things in all their original miscellaneousness, as things that really =are=, and yet--=cannot= be, or give any rational account of themselves. Many years ago in a poem on the death of Francis Thompson, I wrote of the overwhelming mystery that there should be a single grain of dust in existence, the sheer impossibility of it on any rational ground, and how the smallest atom defied exploration and ultimately asserted a superrational origin.

“‘I am ... yet cannot be, ...!

“Chesterton tosses out his thoughts in a glorious liberality; but I am proud to think that this line unconsciously found its way into two of Chesterton’s poems afterwards--‘The House of Christmas,’ where he speaks of ‘the things that cannot be, and that are,’ and the splendid lyric ‘Second Childhood,’ where he says,

“‘And stones still shine along the roads That are and cannot be!’

“Like most men of genius he kept his own immortal childhood all his life; and it was in the matrix of it, the vision that ‘saw’ as a manifestation of something ‘supernatural,’ ‘something that ultimately defied reason, not because it was merely difficult to understand, but because it rested on an eternal and absolute mystery (above and beyond the range of secondary causes) it was in this wonder at the abiding in the terrestrial that he made me feel the power of his faith,

“‘When all my days are ending And I have no songs to sing I think I shall not be too old To stare at everything, As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing--

Strange crawling carpets of the grass Wide windows of the sky--’

“One of the greatest of all his poems is the sonnet entitled ‘The Convert,’ in which he describes how, after he had ‘bowed his head,’ he came out where the old world shone white, and heard ‘myriads of tongues like autumn leaves,’ ‘not so loveable,’ but ‘strange and light,’ in their whispering assumption that, among the old riddles and new creeds, he must now be taken as belonging to a dead past. He sees them singing--not harshly--‘but softly as men smile about the dead.’ And then comes this magnificent and soul-stirring challenge from the ‘dead man’,

“‘The sages have a hundred maps to give That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree. They rattle reason out through many a sieve That holds the soil, but lets the gold go free; And all these things are less than dust to me =Because my name is Lazarus, and I live!=’”

Francis B. Thornton, the authority on Gerard Manley Hopkins, first knew Chesterton through his drinking songs, “An admirable introduction; they were so much more than their title signifies, and they transported me to the happy age which preceded the Malvolios and their hatred of cakes and ale. To me Chesterton will always be the poet. He not only saw what other men looked at, he saw =through= as well, and it was this faculty which gave an angelic quality to his humor. He was like a bull in a china shop, but it was a papal bull enunciating principles in the midst of a wreck of fragile half-truth.”

Mr. J. Corson Miller “was introduced to the poetry of Chesterton by Mr. William Rose Benet who dilated on the vigor and splendor of ‘The Ballad of the White Horse.’ I read that magnificent work, and thereafter read all the verse that G. K. C. produced. I am a great admirer of his poetical work. I admire his flexible sonnets, with their vast sweep of thought, and radiant vision. His various lyrics, love, nature, and religious lyrics, are all excellent; his religious poetry is sublime. His well known lyric, ‘The Donkey,’ with its superb last two lines, or couplet, is unforgettable. His ‘Queen of the Seven Swords’--his second last, if not his last, published volume of verse, bears in my humble opinion, the breadth and fire of eternal life. His was, indeed, a great spirit: no toadying, or cavilling; no smirking or masking, but strong and free, with the strength of the clean West wind, he put his thoughts and opinions and visions in books and papers, and let the seeds of his ideas fall where they would, with results be what they might. His many-sided genius is well known: political and social economist; poet, historian, novelist, short-story writer, artist and cartoonist, playwright--hardly any field in art and literature can be mentioned--without his having touched it in some manner and left his mark, too.”

Prof. Joseph J. Reilly holds that Chesterton will be best remembered for his poetry,

“The initial book I read was ‘Varied Types.’ My first reaction was one of delight in Chesterton’s brilliance, my second a realization that his views were colored so decidedly by his personality that one could not hope to get a genuinely objective appraisal from him. This has always seemed to me an element of strength and of weakness and ever since I have turned to Chesterton’s criticism most largely for the unusual flashes of insight which he shows than for any completely balanced judgment. In one sense he is like a delicious dessert: it is not the main part of a dinner but no dinner would be satisfying without it.

“My next acquaintance was with his ‘Orthodoxy’ which I found full of wisdom, insight, and inspiration. As I went on, I sometimes grew a little weary of his paradoxes but changed my mind when I happened one day upon his statement that to him paradox was ‘truth standing on its head.’

“After reading his volume of poems through several times and thinking him over for many months preparatory to writing an article on Chesterton as poet, I came to the conclusion to which I still cling that Chesterton’s best claim to the attention of our great-grand-children will be based on his poetry.”

John Gould Fletcher considers “Lepanto” is Chesterton’s finest poem, “next to that superb ‘Ballad of the White Horse’--too long for most people, I fancy, but absolutely characteristic of his great, generous, simple, and manly nature.

“I did not learn to like his poetry because of a parent or teacher. From my earliest years I have always read all the poets I could lay my hands on; and in later years, I have continued the practice. I read ‘Lepanto’ and the ‘Ballad’ some time back in 1912 as I recall, during my early years in London--read them and liked them. As regards the American poets, I should say that it was particularly marked in the case of Vachel Lindsay.”

“I am on record,” declares Clement Wood, “that he is the greatest poet of his generation. I well remember when ‘Lepanto’ was recited to Vachel Lindsay by Floyd Dell; but Lindsay missed the rhythm which was ballad measure--seven beats to the line. Lindsay was influenced by Chesterton’s ballad measure which he re-used in the ‘Congo’ and other poems--but as four beats to the line.

“‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ is the greatest of all modern ballads, possibly the greatest of all ballads,--more sustainedly memorable, glorious throughout. Many of the shorter pieces, too, have my warmest admiration.”

“The story of my reading ‘The Battle of Lepanto’ on the shore of Lake Michigan to Vachel Lindsay is true,” declares Floyd Dell. “Note the echo of ‘Lepanto’ in ‘General William Booth,’

“‘Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard Booth enters boldly with his big brass drum.’

“Booth was the first poem in Vachel’s new style, and followed my chanting recitation of the poem--which (my way of reading it) was in turn based on Yeats’ theories of how poetry should be read. Vachel had an unparalleled mental possession of the folk tunes (so to speak) of American speech--camp-meetings, soap-box, tramp, farmer, Negro, and so on--but they never broke through into his own verse until after he had heard the theory of Yeats and the poem of Chesterton.”

Thomas Caldecot Chubb feels that Chesterton has been an important influence in the shaping of a brilliant American poet, “I realize that discussing influences is dangerous and that most people like to think of genius as bursting into the world full grown like Medusa from the forehead of Jove. But quite the opposite is usually true and most men of genius are but the latest--not the last link--in an unending chain. They receive, they use, they pass along. And anyone who will compare ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ with ‘The Drug Shop, or Endymion in Edmonstoun,’ written by Stephen Vincent Benet when he was less than twenty years old, will realize that Benet obtained more than a handful of his poetic implements from Chesterton. This is a paradox in itself, that the gusty panegyrist of the days following the decline of Rome should make an important contribution to so native and so American a voice.”

No better way to end this chapter than with what Stephen Vincent Benet writes the author,

“Thank you for sending me your Chapter on Chesterton’s poetry which I have read with much interest. I have always greatly admired both ‘Lepanto’ and the ‘Ballad of the White Horse’ and I still re-read them.”