On October 17, 1851—as
Virginia Jackson notes in her great book
Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading—Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to her brother Austin that ended with a "poem" that Dickinson did not cut into standard poetic lines but that she presented, instead, as rhyming prose. So far as
Poetry & Popular Culture can discern from the facsimile in Jackson's book, that poem read:
"There is
another sky, Ever serene and fair, and there is
another sun-shine, tho it be darkness there—Never mind faded forests, Austin, never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest, whose leaf is ever green; here is a
brighter garden, where not a frost has been; in its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum; prithee, my brother, into
my garden come!"
Editors of Dickinson's work, Jackson goes on to note, published "There is another sky" as prose in 1894, 1924, and 1931, but beginning with Thomas H. Johnson's
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts (1955) it began to be printed in conventional lines:
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into
my garden come!
The history of "There is another sky" raises a number of questions for Jackson about when the poem in fact became a poem. "Was it never ... a poem," she wonders at one point, "since it was never written as verse? Was it always ... a poem, because it could always have been read as verse? Or was it only ... a poem after it was printed as verse?" Later on, she continues with related questions: "In view of what definition of poetry would Dickinson's brother have understood the end of his sister's letter to him as a poem? Did it only become a poem once it left his hands as a letter? According to what definition of lyric poetry did Dickinson's editor ... understand a lyric poem to be if it was not the passage at the end of the 1851 letter? Can a text not intended as a lyric become one? Can a text once read as a lyric be unread? If so, then what is—or what was—a lyric?"
These and similar questions drive Jackson's inquiry into the historicity of the "lyric" as a sub-genre of the genre of poetry; people in the 19th century, she reveals, didn't understand the genre of the lyric anywhere near the way they do now, and we can gain a greater understanding of Dickinson's verse if we in fact recover what people thought about the lyric "back then" rather than imposing we what we've come to think of as the lyric over the course of the 20th century. The
Poetry & Popular Culture office likes Jackson's line of questioning a lot, although, as always, we'd prefer to start off with a different question: "What, if anything, does a study of
popular poetry have to tell us about Dickinson and verses like 'There is another sky'?" As it turns out—betcha couldn't see this coming—it can tell us quite a bit.
A look at popular verse forms supports the
Poetry & Popular Culture position that Dickinson never intended for "There is another sky" to be cut into lines and that, moreover, Dickinson's brother Austin would have recognized full well that his sister's writing was, in fact, meant to be read as a type of poem in its own right—as what
Sinclair Lewis would later call a "poemulation." It was not at all uncommon for newspapers to print rhyming prose just like "There is another sky." We've seen such poems saved in poetry scrapbooks and would turn the reader's attention, for an example, to a little booklet of poems by James Metcalfe, titled
Portraits (pictured to the left), which collects verses that Metcalfe published in a column of the same name that appeared daily in
The Times (billed as "Chicago's Picture Newspaper") in 1946. We cite "Going Out" here as a sample of Metcalfe's writing which is printed as prose with ellipses substituted for linebreaks:
When we get ready to go out ... It is not long before ... My hat is in my hand and I ... Am standing at the door ... I call my wife and she declares ... That she is nearly through ... And in another minute now ... She will be ready too ... So I go out and start the car ... And get all set to go ... But after while it seems my spouse ... Is just a little slow ... I honk the horn and she replies ... That it will only be ... A tiny second more until ... She will be joining me ... But seconds pass and minutes fade ... I feel my patience snap ... And shutting off the motor I ... Decide to take a nap.
You may be asking yourself round about now, Well just how "not uncommon"
was this sort of verse? It's hard to say for sure, but it was common enough for novelist Sinclair Lewis to capitalize on it in his portrayal of T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the poet in
Babbitt (1922) and "the author of 'Poemulations,' which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world." When we first meet Chum, in fact, his work is explicitly described as "lyric" poetry, though Lewis was likely using "lyric" in a more general and expansive sense than the specific sub-genre of poetry that interests Jackson in
Dickinson's Misery. "Two hours before [meeting Babbitt]," Lewis writes, "Frink had completed a [Prohibition Era] newspaper lyric beginning:
I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, 'There still are boobs, alack, who'd like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!' I'll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!" (Italics in the original)
Later in the novel, as Babbitt is speaking before the dinner of the Zenith Real Estate Board, he incorporates one of Frink's poemulations into his talk and situates it among other popular poets and popular reading practices of the time. Babbitt prefaces Frink's verse by saying, "I always like to remember a piece that Chum Frink wrote for the newspapers about his lecture-tours. It is doubtless familiar to many of you, but if you will permit me, I'll take a chance and read it. It's one of the classic poems, like
'If' by Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox's
'The Man Worth While'; and I always carry this clipping of it in my note-book." Like Frink's lyric cited above, the poem Babbitt quotes is composed entirely in the rhyming, metered verse that both Metcalfe and Dickinson use in their own work.
Dickinson, as Jackson and other scholars have observed, collected all manner of artifacts from print culture of her time, sending clippings to friends, composing on scraps of paper, and perhaps even incorporating this material into the surround or various "backstories" of her poems. How possible is it, then, that Dickinson was in fact writing a prose-poetry, newspaper-style lyric or "poemulation" to her brother Austin in October of 1851? Very possible, say we in the
Poetry & Popular Culture office. Very possible indeed.
As written and played by Orson Welles in the 1941 classic that many people judge to be the greatest movie ever made, the life of Charles Foster Kane begins and ends with poetry. The first and probably most memorable instance comes in the newsreel coverage of Kane's death that follows the film's opening "Rosebud" sequence, where Kane's estate is compared to Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Coleridge's lines, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree," appear onscreen a la title card and are followed by a series of scenes of Kane's luxurious estate with a voice-over reading:
What's interesting about this "News on the March" voice-over is that the narrator actually misquotes the original "Kubla Khan," untangling the inverted syntax of Coleridge's line ("a stately pleasure dome decree") only to replace it with the inverted syntax of the news ("Legendary was the Xanadu"). This spectacular moment not only has the effect of turning the news into poetry and poetry into prose—a totally fitting twist for the newspaperman's obituary—but also, in introducing two ways of saying the Coleridge poem, figures the conflicted narratives at the center of Kane's tragic life: a man who could afford to buy anything but who wanted what money couldn't buy; a man who was a success in business but not in life, etc.
We encounter poetry a second time when we first meet Kane at the beginning of his career—a young man, played by Welles, in the office of the New York Inquirer, that feisty, rag-tag daily which gave Kane his start in the newspaper biz. In this scene (pictured below), Kane is no longer the young boy (Buddy Swan) playing in the snow out West and being removed to parts East for a proper upbringing, but a cocksure, idealistic underdog using his paper, in good Progressive-Era muckraking fashion, to root out corporate fraud and advocate on behalf of the poor. Kane's former guardian, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris) of the legal firm Thatcher & Company, comes to see Kane to protest what he sees as the Inquirer's unfair coverage of these and other items and, while Thatcher's there, Kane is brought a telegram by personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane). Bernstein doesn't want to read the cable aloud, but Kane insists. Here's that passage:
As we've mentioned before—via the "poem- ulations" of Emily Dickinson, Chum Frink, and James Metcalfe—prose poetry was no stranger to the daily news, but here Welles is actually leaving those poems unwritten; if the movie transformed news into poetry and poetry into prose early on, here it intervenes to prevent poetic composition in the first place, once again rewriting the poet as the newspaper editor, with the exception that both now deal in prose rather than in the verse of "Kubla Khan." Furthermore, it is Kane's news service that's granted power to make and create, able to conjure up wars (or pleasure domes) where none exist—a capability once associated with poetry and of particular concern to "Kubla Khan." In a sense, Kane takes the modernist cry to "Make it new!" and rewrites it as, "Make it news!"
In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams famously wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems..." People have offered all sorts of reasons why that might or might not be the case, but Citizen Kane offers us yet another possibility: that people do in fact get the news from poems, and part of that news is that American newspapers are the new poetry. From the perspective of 2010, by which point in time both poetry and newspapers have been pronounced dead or dying, that's one Xanadu, perhaps, that even Samuel Taylor Coleridge's mythical bard couldn't call back.
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