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Article Excerpt
Hemingway's poetry, which he published only during the first decade of his career, appeared almost exclusively in "little magazines." This poetry has never garnered much scholarly attention, and Hemingway himself often downplayed its value or significance. His unwillingness to claim the poems, the early date of their publication, and their striking parallels to developments in his prose writing all indicate that the poems were part of the author's training as a writer. These poems thus serve as an important archive of his apprenticeship, revealing information not only about the development of his style but about the formulation of his authorial persona.
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"MR[.] HEMINGWAY'S POEMS are not particularly important, but his prose is of the first distinction, writes Edmund Wilson in the October 1924 edition of The Dial (340). Apparently Hemingway agreed with Wilson's assessment. Except for his encounter with Kandisky on safari in Green Hills of Africa, when Hemingway was pleased to meet the Austrian who recognized him as the "dichter" (poet) from Der Querschnitt, he did not identify himself as a poet (7). Hemingway even went so far as to write to bibliographer Louis Henry Cohn that he preferred his poems not be included in the official bibliography (Letter to Cohn). Like the critics who would later study his work, Hemingway dismissed poems like "The Earnest Liberal's Lament" and others that appeared in Der Querschnitt as "obscene" (GHOA 7).
This uncharacteristic reticence is particularly striking because Hemingway was a self-proclaimed expert on any subject that interested him, and we know from his letters that Hemingway had a keen interest in poetry. In 1926 he wrote to Ernest Walsh: "As for Yeats he and Ezra and Anonymous are my favourite poets.... All I can say is that I believe there has always been good poetry and with a little luck there will always be a little" (SL 190). In the same letter he quotes a few lines from an anonymous 16th century ballad and writes "This is my idea of poetry." Clearly Hemingway understood and enjoyed good poetry, but apparently felt little pressure to write it himself. Because he was an author who would publish in many genres--including short fiction, the novel, parody, travelogue, drama, and journalism--Hemingway's repeated moves to dis-own his work in a genre so foundational to the modernist identity is significant and puzzling.
More than eighty years have passed since Wilson reviewed Three Stories and Ten Poems and in our time, and scholars have yet to contest his judgment that Hemingway's poetry is "not particularly important." In their haste to dismiss the poems--rightly or wrongly--as aesthetically unsound, scholars have overlooked ways in which the poems illustrate the development of the artist. Scholars stand in general agreement that Hemingway's poetry is not very good. For example, Donald Junkins writes that Hemingway's poems are "passionless, choppy, often sentimental halflines," and Nicholas Joost finds the poems to be "in the most questionable taste" (Junkins, "Hemingway's Contribution" 18; Joost 127). What scholarship there is on the poems generally makes three arguments: first, that Hemingway's poetry reflects the influence of a wide range of writers including Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson and others; second, that Hemingway's poetry demonstrates how he established himself as an important name on the Paris literary scene even before he published any fiction; third, that Hemingway's talent as a poet lies in the poetics of his prose rather than in his actual poetry. Some scholars, like Charles Fenton and Bruce Morton, come close to making the argument that Hemingway's poetry anticipates his prose, but their antipathy towards the poems prevents an earnest study of this possibility. (1)
Hemingway's unwillingness to claim the poems, as well as their striking parallels to developments in his prose writing, do-suggest that the poems were part of the author's training as a writer. Perhaps Hemingway distanced himself from his poetry because of the role it played in his development. Poetry seems to have been most interesting or useful to him early in his career when he was making the transition from journalism to fiction. In the introduction to the Complete Poems, Nicholas Gerogiannis notes that Hemingway wrote 73 of his 88 poems by 1929, dating the bulk of his poetry output to the first decade of a forty-year career. (2) In overlooking Hemingway's poetry, scholars may be overlooking an important archive of the author's development as a prose stylist. While some of the similarities between Hemingway's poetry and prose may be coincidental--as the author acquired fluency in one genre it may simply have translated to the other--on at least two occasions, the poems clearly functioned as experimental drafts of difficult prose exercises. In these poems and others we can trace the formulation of stylistic and thematic elements that would come to characterize his prose.
In order to give sustained consideration to a few individual poems and to look at some of the poems that seem central to Hemingway's early career, this essay will focus only on the poems published in little magazines during the 1920s: "They All Made Peace--What is Peace," "Ultimately," "Mitrailliatrice," "Neothomist Poem," "Riparto d'Assalto," "The Age Demanded," "The Earnest Liberal's Lament," and "Valentine." I will begin by exploring two poems that worked, at least in part, as drafts of later prose pieces. The essay will then identify poetic elements that parallel or anticipate Hemingway's prose in content or in style, examining early manifestations of Hemingway's economy of style, his themes of disillusionment in the wake of World War I, and his nascent iceberg theory. Hemingway's early poems illustrate his developing sense of himself as a writer and contain germinal elements of theories on writing that he would explicate later in Death in the Afternoon and in his private correspondence--reflections on what an author should reveal, what he should conceal, how he should write action and people, and, most importantly, how he should write "truly." Finally, the essay argues that because Hemingway did not consider himself a poet, he could therefore experiment freely in the genre without damaging his ethos as a writer of prose. Thus the poems themselves are part of the iceberg--the submerged body of experience that contributes to...
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