Chapter 17
Section 17 of Literature in the Making by Some of Its Makers. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Betty B. Literature in the Making by Some of Its Makers. City Life vs. Literature by Joyce Kilmer and John Burroughs Well, said John Burroughs, she doesn't seem to want us out here, so I guess we'll have to go in.
So we left the little summer house overlooking the Hudson and went into the bark-walled study. Now, she was a fat and a vicious robin, and her nest was in a corner of the summer house, just over my head, as I sat with the poet-naturalist. the nest was full of hungry and unprepossessing young robins and the mother robin seemed to be annoyed in her visits to it by our talk as we walked to the study leaving to the robin family undisputed possession of the summer-house i heard john burroughs say in tones of mild indignation half to himself and half to me i won't stand this another year this is the third year she's taken possession of that summer-house and next may she simply must build her nest somewhere else
nevertheless i think that this impudent robin will rear her nineteen hundred seventeen brood in john burroughs's summer-house if she wants to When I walked up from the station to Riverby, John Burroughs' 20-acre home on the west shore of the Hudson, I was surprised by the agility of my 79-year-old companion. He walked with the elastic step of a young man, and his eyes and brain were as alert as in the days when he showed Emerson and Whitman the wild wonders of the hills. Living in the city, he said, is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city is a place to which one goes to do business. It is a place where men overreach one another in the fight for
money. But it is not a place in which one can live. Years ago I think it was possible to have a home in the city. I used to think that a home in Boston might possibly be imagined. But no one can have a home in New York in all that noise and haste. Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations. All this grind and rush and roar of the subway and the surface cars must have some effect on the children of New Yorkers,
and that effect cannot be good. And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a passionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of aesthetic perception? I'd like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no repose in New York, so far as I can see.
Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can find repose in the city. I can't. I hear the people write on the trains, on the omnibus, and in the subway. I don't see how they do it. Have you noticed, I ask, as we left the lane and walked down a grassy slope toward the study, that the city has not as yet set its mark on our literature? I think, said John Burroughs, that much of our modern fiction shows what I may call a metropolitan
quality. It seems made up of showy streets and electric light. But I don't know. I don't read much fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city, and reflected the life of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the city.
They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country, his study under the pines, where, as he wrote, the sacred pine tree adds to the leaves her myriads. Of the younger poets, John James Piat has written beautifully of the city. He wrote a very fine poem called The Morning Street, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly some years ago. In it he describes vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a solitary traveler echo from the
walls of the sleeping houses. I don't suppose Piat is known to many readers of this generation. He was a friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of Poems by Two Friends, published in the early sixties. This was Howells' first venture. We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw, among the photographs of Carlisle and Emerson and other friends of my host, a portrait of Whitman.
Your friend, Walt Whitman, I said, got inspiration from the city? Yes, said John Burroughs. He got inspiration from the city, but you wouldn't call his poem city poetry. His way of writing wasn't metropolitan. You know, you might say that he treated the city by a country method. What he loved about the city was its people. He loved the throngs of men. He loved human associations.
But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the human critter, as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the city and was more at home there than in the country. He came to Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law office and as a printer and on the eagle. For a while, I remember, he drove a bus up and down Broadway when the driver, who was a friend of his, was sick.
That's where he got the stuff he put in, the funeral of an old omnibus driver. He put in it all the signs and catchwords of the bus drivers. John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big-frame photograph on the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated, with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's. Whitman, John Burroughs continued, seems to be appealing more and more to young men.
But in the modern, Whitman-esque young poets, I don't see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths as his imitators failed to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by Whitman.
His North of Boston is very good. It is genuine realism. It is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first saw the book, I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it all with keen interest.
It's absolutely true. i used to see whitman often when he and i were working in washington and he came up to see me here when i was in washington whitman used to like to come up to our house for sunday morning breakfast mrs burroughs makes capital pancakes and walt was very fond of them but he was always late for breakfast the coffee would boil over the griddle would smoke car after car would go jingling by and no walt but a car would stop at last and walt would roll off it and saunter up to the door cheery vigorous serene putting every one in good humor and how he ate he radiated health and hopefulness this is what made his work among the six soldiers in washington of such inestimable value every one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare compelling charm
very few young literary men of whitman's day accepted him steadman did and the fact is greatly to his credit howells and aldrich were repelled by his bigness all the boston poets except emerson hesitated emerson didn't hesitate unlike lowell and holmes he kept open house for big ideas i asked mr burroughs what in his opinion had brought about the change in the world's attitude toward whitman well he replied looking thoughtfully into the radiant depths of the open fire when whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the conventional standards of english literature we understood and appreciated only the pretty and exact whitman came in his working man's garb in his shirt-sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature we resented it but the young men nowadays are more liberal more and more whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards science supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than our forefathers knew and then the european acceptance of whitman had had its effect we take our point of view so largely from europe
and a force like whitman's must be felt slowly it's a cumulative thing you believe i said that whitman is our greatest poet oh yes he replied whitman is the greatest poet america has produced he is great with the qualities that make homer and the classic poets great emerson is more precious more intellectual whitman and emerson are our two greatest poets while we strolled over the pleasant turf and watched a wood thrush resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the cherry blossoms john burroughs returned to the subject that we had discussed on our way from the station the city's evil effect on literature business life he said is inimical to poetry to write poetry you must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city and one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper the style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far as possible from art and literature when you are writing for a daily paper you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way
but in an efficient way in a business-like way there is no appeal to the imagination no ideality a newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people if you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the newspapers get thee behind me satan a poet can't be developing his gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle the daily paper is a new institution and it has come to stay but it has bad manners and it is the enemy of all meditation all privacy all things that make for great art It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very important for us to remember that the bee does
not get honey from the flowers. It makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into honey. So many nature writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They go into the woods and come out again and write about their experience, but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject what they find in the woods to a
private process. They don't give us honey. They give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly diluted. In my own work, if I may mention it in all humbleness, I have tried for years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it gets into honey by adding its own formic acid. If I lived in the city, I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in obliterating the city from my consciousness,
but i shouldn't try to force my standards on every one other men live in the cities and write carlyle did most of his work in london but he lived a secluded life even in the city and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to scotland it is some years since john burroughs has written poetry although all his prose is clearly the work of a poet and it is safe to say that better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door world better known even than wake robin and that immortal a hunt for the nightingale and in fresh fields is one of his poems waiting the poem that begins serene i fold my hands and wait nor care for wind nor tide nor sea i rave no more gainst time or fate for lo my own shall come to me i wrote waiting he said in eighteen hundred sixty two when i was reading medicine in the office of a country physician it was a dingy afternoon and i was feeling pretty blue but the thought came to me i suppose i got it from goethe or some of the orientals probably by way of emerson that what belonged to me would come to me in time if i waited and if i also hustled so i waited and i hustled and my little poem turned out to be a prophecy
my own has come to me as i never expected it to come the best friends i have were seeking me all the while there's henry ford he had read all my books and he came to me that great-hearted man the friend of all the birds and my friend the poem first appeared in the knickerbocker magazine that magazine was edited by a cockney named kaneha cornwallis it ran long enough to print one of cornwallis's novels and then it died i remember that the knickerbocker magazine never paid me for waiting and the poem didn't attract any attention until whittier printed it in his songs of three centuries it has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it it was found among the manuscripts of a poet down south after his death and his literary executor was going to print it in his book he wrote to me and asked if i could show a date for it earlier than eighteen hundred eighty two i said yes eighteen hundred sixty two and that settled that matter
there was a man in boston that i wanted to kick he wrote to me and asked if he could print waiting on a card and circulate it among his friends i told him he could and sent him an autograph copy to make sure he'd get it straight he sent me a package of the printed cards and i found that he had added a stanza to it a religious stanza all about heaven's gate he had left out the second stanza and added this religious stanza he was worried because god had been left out of my poem Poor God, ignored by a little Adam like me. When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me. It's a sort of transcendental version
of foreordination. I think the poem is true. Like attracts like. It's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any conscious factor that ensures success. It's that that makes our fortunes. It's that that is the tide in the affairs of men that Shakespeare meant. A few rods from John Burroughs' Riverside house, a brown thrush is building her nest in a cherry tree. She is a bird of individual ideas, and is thoroughly convinced that paper, not twigs and leaves, forms the proper
bases for her work. It is pleasant to think of John Burroughs, seated in his study, communing with the memories of Whitman and Emerson, and his other great dead friends. But it is pleasanter to think of him, as I saw him, anxious and intent, his great white beard mingled with the cherry blossoms, as he strolled over to fix the paper base of the thrush's nest, so that the wind could not destroy it.
