Richard Vallance
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Vallance Review 33, May 2004
Part 2: Alan Seeger: a True Romantic at Heart
"Of all the poets who have died young, none has died so happily." [1]
[Continued from last month's Vallance Review]
Published in 1916
Last month, we reviewed the sonnets of the early Twentieth century American poet, Alan Seeger, as a quintessential latter-day Renaissance Man.
This month, we revisit Alan Seeger's sonnets. This time, however, we examine them in light of his self-professed love of poetic Romanticism. There never was, nor can there be, any doubt that Alan Seeger is a true Romantic at heart. He often says so in so many words himself:
If this sounds a lot like William Wordsworth, we cannot just be imagining it. On the other hand, Alan Seeger's delight in life bears the distinct stamp of his own passionate personality and of his generation, which was already far removed from the spirit, if not the tone, of Wordsworth's poetry.
Or yet again, our poet exults, in similarly evocative language,
Ferns at his elbow, lilies round his knees,
With sweet flesh patterned where the cool turf pressed,
Flowerlike crept o'er with emerald aphides.
FROM "Antinous"
Now, these lush verses cannot but remind me of the subtly nuanced sonnets of none other than the great Pre-Raphaelite poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Here is one last example of Alan Seeger's own confessed predilection for not only the Romantic's poetic diction, but even for a Romantic creed, which he openly declares:
I suppose no poet could have been more explicit than this in declaring outright his preference for a particular mode of poetic expression, being here, the Romantic, except perhaps John Keats, who embraced such similar lofty ideals a full century earlier.
I could cite numerous other examples of such telling signs or symbols intimating our poet's fondness for Romantic expression, but I leave it to you, the reader, to pursue the ardent study of Alan Seeger's beautiful sonnets and poems, and to judge for yourself the degree and the depth of his commitment to his own brand of the Romantic's credo.
THE SONNET
Give me the treble of thy horns and hoofs,
The ponderous undertones of 'bus and tram,
A garret and a glimpse across the roofs
Of clouds blown eastward over Notre Dame,
The glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings
Where I drank deep the bliss of being young,
The strife and sweet potential flux of things
I sought Youth's dream of happiness among!
It walks here aureoled with the city-light,
Forever through the myriad-featured mass
Flaunting not far its fugitive embrace, --
Heard sometimes in a song across the night,
Caught in a perfume from the crowds that pass,
And when love yields to love seen face to face. Alan Seeger
Maurice Utrillo. rue à Paris = street in Paris, 1914
Brief Commentary on the Sonnet:
I featured this sonnet because it, along with several others Alan Seeger composed in a similar vein, so vividly brings to life his personal experiences as a man of his day and age, who lived in a city, Paris, he all but worshipped, yet who was equally aware of the threat of impending War that would soon burst upon everyone's lives, and doom his own. Precisely because of his nobility of spirit, Alan Seeger would soon sign up with the French Foreign Legion, and soon after that, pay for his valiant decision by forfeiting his life at Belloy-en-Santerre, July 5th., 1916.
In this sonnet, Alan Seeger paints for us a lively panorama of one of the World's greatest and loveliest cities poised at the confluence of the "old world" Nineteenth Century and the "new world" Twentieth, which was about to shatter practically every social, ethical and literary norm that had dominated Europe for at least the previous half century.
Right off the bat, in the first verse, our poet strikes the note of tension between these two worlds, where he exults at the commingled sounds of horse drawn carriages and the klaxons (horns) of early automobiles. In just one phrase, he paints a truly memorable picture of an eye-witness account, couched in pure poetic language, of the bustle of the city he so passionately adored. That one noun, "treble" (which we would normally expect to be an adjective), sets the tone for the entire verse, and with great effect. Here, his sonnet shares with other great poems of the ages, this salient feature, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge so (aptly) identified in his Biographia Literaria:
In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word;...[2]
Yet, at the same time, this same poem shares many characteristics in common with poetic diction we normally associate with the great Romantics. Phrases like, "clouds blown eastward", "glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings", "the bliss of being young", "here aureoled with the city-light" and "when love yields to love seen face to face" are surely reminiscent of the highly imaginative outpourings of such poets as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and, in the case of the last phrase I have cited here, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This is no mere happenstance. I have thoroughly read all of Alan Seeger's sonnets, and drunk in his every word, and I cannot help but be left with the distinct impression that he was intimately familiar with all of these poets, bar none, and still others, including, amongst others, William Wordsworth, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Matthew Arnold. This impression is substantiated by William Archer's observations of Alan Seeger's voracious reading habits and his deep love of past master poets, which he highlights more than once in his Introduction to the poet's book:
He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard, and at the magnificent Boston library. During his first two years at college, his bent seemed to be rather towards the studious and contemplative... [3]
In short, while this sonnet is a piece of its time, it is also securely set in the poetic diction and vivid imagery we would expect from any of the high Romantic poets.
William Archer's assessment of Alan Seeger as a "Romantic" Poet
William Archer, in his Introduction to the Poems of Alan Seeger (1916), freely acknowledges the strong Romantic flair that runs throughout the skein of our poet's sonnets, as for instance, where he asserts:
I do not, I repeat, pretend to measure him with Shelley, Byron or Keats, though I think none of them would have disdained his gift for song. But assuredly he is of their fellowship in virtue, not only of his early death, but of his whole-hearted devotion to the spirit of Romance, as they understood it. (italics mine) [4]
As our review will amply illustrate, Archer's evaluation of Alan Seeger as a true Neo-Romantic at heart, in his understanding of the essence of poetry and in his poetic style is very much a propos. While Archer stresses that Alan Seeger is not in the same league as the great Romantics he associates the latter-day poet with, he does not categorically state Seeger is inferior to them. Alan Seeger never perhaps had the chance to plumb the depths of the human condition as they did, but any comparison of his own rather meagre output of poems to the voluminous outpourings of any of these great poets, his forbears, would be specious, to say the least. As William Archer himself admits, had Alan Seeger lived to write poetry for many more years, he might have reached a similar pinnacle of poetic genius. But he never got the chance. Any speculation about Seeger's potential as a "great" poet is therefore a waste of time. What we do know, as Archer so fittingly concludes, here was a poet whose "one passion was beauty: and it was in the guise of Romance that beauty revealed itself to him." [5] It is my contention, however, that even in the limited number of poems he did manage to compose prior to his untimely death, there are some real gems, and these are more than enough to set Alan Seeger on the stage of history as one of the Silver Poets of the ages.
A Statistical Approach to the Sonnets of Alan Seeger
This month, we are breaking the not so sacred "traditions" of the Vallance Review by taking a novel approach to our study of Alan Seeger's sonnets as examples of Neo-Romantic poetry. Instead of offering up our usual running commentary on the sonnets we are reviewing, we are presenting our readers with a cross-sectional statistical analysis, however cursory, of the words and phrases poets and poetry readers alike usually associate with the nomenclatures, "Romanticism" or "Neo-Romanticism". We have statistically scanned all of Alan Seeger's sonnets for the presence of certain tell-tale keywords. These are thematically categorized and enumerated, from lowest to highest frequency of use, in the table below:
A Cross-Sectional Statistical Analysis of Alan Seeger's Sonnets
for the Recurrence of Words related to Romantic Poetic Language
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Keywords [KW]
KEY: A = A words related to human longings: desire, passion, happiness, love and joy
B = words related to nature
*** less than 15 occurrences ***
A 4 bless and variants
B 5 rain, rainbow, showers = 3 + 2 = 5
A 6 Romantic, romance
A 6 adore, adores, adoring
B 7 nature
B 8 green, greenwood's
A 8 happy, happier, happiness
A 8 joy and variants
B 9 ocean = 3 + sea = 4 + bay = 2
B 9 moon, moonbeams, moonlit (eternal poetic symbol of the feminine force in nature)
B 10 cloud, clouds, cloudy
A 10 desire + passion = 7 + 3
A 11 eye, eyes
A 12 youth + boy + young = 7 + 3 + 2
B 13 city + street + café + Notre Dame (always refers to Paris) = 8 + 3 + 1 + 1
*** 15 or more occurrences ***
B 19 Spring, April, May, summer, midsummer = 5 + 1 + 2 + 9 + 2
B 19 blue + azure + sky = 10 + 3 + 6
A 23 beauty 21 + beautiful 2 [B] (a)
B 25 flower, flowers, flowery, flowered + lilies, lily-breasted [A] (a) + rose, rosy
A 38 she 5 + her 33 (b)
A 45 love and its variants
TOTAL: 181 58 % All A words related to desire, passion, happiness, love and joy
TOTAL: 135 42 % All B words related to nature
TOTAL: 316 All Keywords
NOTES:
(a) It is readily apparent that many of the keywords in this table could easily fall under either category A or B. Naturally, in an unscientific literary cross-sectional statistical analysis such as this, keywords have to be assigned to either one or the other category. I could have assigned such keywords to both categories, but this study is not intended by any means to be exhaustive or all-inclusive. Rather it is meant to serve as indicative of Alan Seeger's own reliance on "Romantic" poetic vocabulary. Nor is it reasonable to consider this selective vocabulary table as a concordance to the sonnets of Alan Seeger.
(b) Seeger's heavy reliance on the objective form of the third person feminine, i.e. "her" clearly reveals his worship of woman as the blessed object of all his most exalted desires and the source of his greatest joy.
(c) As I have pointed out in the first note (a), this table is not a concordance. I deliberately limited the scope of this illustrative, albeit cursory, investigation of "Romantic" vocabulary in Alan Seeger's sonnets to those words and phrases most critics, as well as poets of a Romantic bent, are likely to associate with Romanticism.
Many of the keywords we find in this table are highly reminiscent of vocabulary that recurs frequently in such Nineteenth Century poets as William Wordsworth, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, words such as, "Romantic" itself, "joy", "sky, azure" and their variants, and "ocean" and its variants. Moreover, this vocabulary is clearly indicative of a disciplined methodology underlying not only the sonnets of Alan Seeger, but of the Romantic and Victorian poets who preceded him. Contrary to popular belief, Romantic poetry is not, nor ever was, an undisciplined outpouring of passionate emotions. Far from it. And it is on this note, as we shall shortly see, that I shall bring this review to its inevitable conclusion.
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What Makes Alan Seeger so truly a Romantic at Heart?
From our preceding observations, along with William Acher's pronouncements on Alan Seeger's sensibilities as a poet, and the sonneteer's own self-professed adoration of Beauty, Romance, valour and courage as literary and personal ideals, we may well conclude that our poet does indeed fall firmly into the Romantic tradition. But he has done more than that. He has redefined it in the context and in light of the evolving circumstances that were rapidly shaping the world he inhabited, driving it inexorably away from the comfortable progressive world-views of the moribund Neo-Victorian world and into the jaws of hell, World War I, the first defining event of angst and human alienation that was to indelibly stamp the entire Twentieth Century. Yet, in spite of all the harsh realities which were crashing in on everyone in Europe, and which Alan Seeger was only too keenly aware of (as attested in more than a few of his sonnets [6] ), our gallant poet clung to his high ideals, not as a desperado might, but with honour and courage and faith. These everywhere illuminate his sonnets, and indeed his poetry all in all.
What then are the salient characteristics, not only of his poetry, but of himself as poet? In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge once again gives us several clear indications and clues. While Coleridge himself did not use the term "Romantic" in his literary memoirs, as he was a living emblem of that literary period, he was and still remains one of the greatest ever critics in the annals of English literature and poetry. And his powers of discrimination were all the more astute where he had to characterize the merits and salient features of the poetry of his own age. With his usual perspicacity, Coleridge notes that, where great poets are concerned:
What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, through and emotions of the poet's own mind. (italics mine)
The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth to each other.
He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic [7] and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. [8]
And there, in a nutshell, we have it, not only Coleridge's whole philosophy and (as it were) "definition" of the ars poetica, but also and at once the very essence of the Romantic poet. Do not the sonnets of Alan Seeger, however limited their number, follow this pattern almost to a nicety? I should think so.
Elsewhere, all through his intensely demanding masterpiece of literary and poetic criticism at their pinnacle, the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge puts a fine point, over and over, to the marked distinction between mere verse and rhyme, simple metre and talent given to the vagrancies of fancies, and real poetry, which only real poets of truly original, indeed, unique genius, are bound to create, on the other. For all the meagreness of his life's literary output, Alan Seeger is of the class of true poets.
Without seeking recourse at this juncture to Coleridge's meticulous cataloguing of those characteristics which are the salient features of true poetry/poets, I will nevertheless draw your attention to the merits of the sonnets of Alan Seeger. These are:
1. a marked originality of nuanced diction and local colour in his sonnets, with the one caveat I issued in the previous Vallance Review (April 2004), namely; that they can occasionally lapse into an over-reliance on archaisms;
2. a vivid and highly personalized imagination, which at the same time strikes chords of universal appeal to all that is noblest in the hearts and minds of humans;
3. an imagination that is able to abstract general ethical truths applicable to humankind as a whole, yet through the poetically focused medium of specific and concrete, vivid imagery which is his and his own;
4. a strong sense of purpose and of thematic, mental and emotional focus in practically all his sonnets;
5. as a corollary to the previous two points, his innate ability to depict everything, every place and every person he touches in his descriptions with the most vivid and lively of discrete intentional images, such as (to reference just a few):
Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze. (Sonnet II)
Welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes (Sonnet IV)
the freaked flag and meadow buttercup,... (Sonnet XII)
and perhaps most remarkably of all
And, sick with all those centuries of tears
Shed in the penance for factitious woe,
Once more I saw the nations at her feet,
For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears
Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo!
The breast your lips abjured is still as sweet. (Sonnet XV)
Nowhere else in all his sonnets does Alan Seeger more evidently proclaim the visionary powers of human redemption though intense love, even in the face of the horrors that beset Europe and France at the time he was actively pursuing the only métier that ever truly mattered to him, his one and only Muse, resplendent in his poetry. [9]
6. Finally, there is his a consistent devotion to higher spiritual ideals, which our poet intimates throughout the skein of his verses, and more than once explicitly declares, as we have already witnessed in the last citation I have just quoted above.
All of these marks of genius and more set Alan Seeger apart as a sonneteer of true, if wholly unrealized, genius, a poet who was sadly cut off in his prime of life, in spite of all the joy and devotion he poured out for everyone he knew. In this, he was most assuredly like William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge before him, one of their brethren in kind and in poetic spirit. Likewise, he was a poetic brother or at least cousin to Rupert Brooke, his contemporary, whose own profound sensibilities and love of humanity I focussed on at length in the November 2002 Vallance Review [10]. If the tone of these two reviews strikes a similar chord of empathy for each of these fine Silver poets in your heart and in your mind, small wonder then.
All the more remarkable is the fact that here we have, in the person of one poet at the outset of the last Century, a Renaissance man par excellence, as I have already established in last month's review, but at one and the same time, a true Romantic at heart. Such poets are few and far between.
© by Richard Vallance (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) with the editorial assistance of Jim Dunlap (Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.A.) April 26 2004
REFERENCES & NOTES:
[1] Archer, William, Introduction, pg. xi, in Seeger, Alan. Poems by Alan Seeger. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, © 1916. xlvi, 174 pp. [from the private collection of Richard Vallance]
The full text of William Archer's Introduction can also be consulted online here, Poems by Alan Seeger: Introduction
[2] Citation from page 3, Chapter 1, in: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., © 1906, printed 1947. [First published in 1817] xiii, 305 pp.
The first thirteen chapters of S.T. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria are also available here, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Biographia Literaria. Vol. 1. (1817)
[3] Archer, William. Op. Cit., pg. xx
[4] Ibid., pg. xii
[5] Ibid.
[6] Alan Seeger's noble idealism shines through in such phrases as " love yields to love seen face to face" (Sonnet VI), and in such sonnets as, Sonnet XII (so nearly Keatsian), "Virginibus Puerisque..." and "To England at the Outbreak of the Balkan War" (in many ways reminiscent of Percy Bysshe Shelley's, "England in 1819")
[7] The reader should beware of misinterpreting the meaning of "synthesis" in this context. Coleridge is in no way referring to the concept of "synthetic" as we understand it today.
He means instead, "the combination of ideas into a complex whole [syn: synthetic thinking] [ant: analysis]. See Dictionary.com: definition, "synthesis"
This philosophical/literary meaning of the word is directly derived from the Greek, "sunthesis" = "a putting together, compounding, composition; covenant", from the verb: "suntiheimi" = "to put together so as to form a whole, compose; to order, organize SOURCE: Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, Clarendon Press, © 1986. pg. 680
[8] Citation from page 151, Chapter XIV, in: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., © 1906, printed 1947. [First published in 1817] xiii, 305 pp.
[9] In a parting letter to his mother, as William Archer recalls, "he says that an article about Rupert Brooke in which his name was mentioned 'gave him rather more pain than pleasure, for it rubbed in the matter which most rankled in his heart, that he never could get his book of poems published before the war.' " (Archer, William, Op. Cit., pg. xxxvi) What is still more significant about Alan Seeger's concerns here is that he places himself on the same level as a poet the likes of Rupert Brooke -- and rightly so.
[10] Vallance Review November 2002: Rupert Brooke's, "The Dead" (1915)
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