Reality Is Wild and on the Wing

Marguerite Young is known primarily for a mammoth novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), a hallucinatory picaresque featuring an ensemble of eccentric characters, and for two novelistic historical studies: Angel in the Forest (1945), about the Utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana, and Harp Song for a Radical (1999), a rhapsodic biography of Eugene Debs. She’s hardly known at all for her two books of poetry, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1944). Though her prose works have been in and out of print over the years, her poetry collections were never reprinted after their first appearances. As coeditor Phil Bevis explains in his preface to the newly published The Collected Poems (Sublunary Editions and Chatwin Books, 2022), he sought to reprint Young’s poems 35 years ago with his Arundel Press, but the hunt for some missing verse delayed the project until now. It was worth the wait. The Collected Poems gathers every Young poem that survives—published, unpublished, drafts—for a definitive edition that rivals the work of a university press.

The poems of a prose writer—think of William Faulkner or Angela Carter—are usually a side stream, but for Young, poetry was the fountainhead of her creativity. Virtually all of these poems were written before the publication of Angel in the Forest, which, as she notes in the introduction that she wrote for the abandoned Arundel edition, began as “a series of about sixty lyric ballads, a form which proved inadequate for the inclusion of facts and figures, and which I then rewrote as a long pseudo-Miltonic blank verse poem, which also proved inadequate.” As she converted her verse into prose, she retained the lyricism and cadences of her poetry, her imagist eye for what Pound called “luminous details,” her vast vocabulary and fanciful conceits, and her admiration for the “easy naturalism” of James Whitcomb Riley, whom she mentions on the second page of Angel in the Forest. (She worked on a biography of Riley for years.) Even the title of this tale of two 19th-century American utopias comes from a sentence that could be parsed into lines of poetry: “Our ancestors, always hurried / left little evidence of their existence, / if one discounts intangibles, / a sundial, an apple a day, / an angel in the forest.” Conversely, the subject of her early poem “The Seeker,” a collector of postcards, is an eccentric like those in Miss MacIntosh. Because of Young’s avoidance of rhyme and use of enjambment, it could easily have been set in prose and inserted somewhere in that novel. Writing poetry prepared Young for writing magniloquent prose, and reading The Collected Poems prepares readers for her maximalist novel.

The first of five sections in the Collected Poems gathers Young’s earliest verse, most written in her 20s (the century’s ’30s) and published in a variety of little magazines—including Poetry. The poems alternate between rhymed and free verse, between Edna St. Vincent Millay willfulness and Sara Teasdale wistfulness, but aside from “The Seeker” and three or four others, they give little indication of what was to come.

The complete text of Prismatic Ground follows, and though Young was only 29 when it appeared, it clearly marks the end of her apprenticeship: a deck of 52 poems, nearly all of them confident, innovative, and idiosyncratic. Instead of Millay and Teasdale, these poems evoke Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens: the former (on whom Young later wrote an essay) for her attention to animals, and the Emperor of Ice-Cream for his iridescent imagery, dandy diction, and Cirque du Soleil vibe. Consider, for example, “All Saints’ Day”:

There will be on the branch of the wild, wet cherry
Not the vexed bloom but calm leaves of early
Saints where the velvet shadows lengthen
In orchards shuttered from moon and sun;
Those fibrous hearts will be unspun
Like silken webs on breathless air
Gleaming among globules of the green pear.
Dim leaves of seraphim,
Gold flood of flesh gone dim,
Will drift above the azure dust
Of eyelids closed like wildest
Starlings startled swept by storm;
There will be no one whose blood is warm.

One poem carries the Stevensesque title “Experiment in Azure,” and the eponymous star of Young’s “Proudest Lady” is straight from his central casting:

She is vain of the bright orioles;
She is obscurely proud
Of apple leaves or April’s
Opalescent cloud.
 
She is vain of curious things,
Not of her wing-sleek hair
Nor of her jewelled rings.
But of the spotted air,
 
The fluted frost briefer
Than flowers, and the moon’s wane,
As if they belong to her,
She is absurdly vain.

Note the ostentatious alliteration, as flashy as the lady herself—oh so many o’s in that first stanza and an effusion of f’s in the final one—and the trapeze-act daring of rhyming “orioles” with “or April’s.” But the setting is rural: like Robert Frost, Young is versed in country things and often deliberately confuses realms by comparing the sea with meadows, the sky with the fields, all the while bringing a naturalist’s expertise to her observations. Only one poem in Prismatic Ground, “Paradise Is Still Lost,” takes place in the city, specifically “At the Club Ha-Ha, the Dime, the Candle, [. . .] where curtains are drawn and voices, blood-thick, / it is better not to speak of sweet redemption / on Iowa farms.” This remarkable, rambling poem could be the lyrics to a raucous mid-’60s song by Bob Dylan, but you’ll have to read it to see what I mean. Virtually all of the poems in Prismatic Ground use rhyme, and a few evoke older works (Genesis, Milton, Gulliver’s Travels), but there is a modernist swagger to the book, and Young wasn’t afraid to include a few lesbian lyrics. It is an impressive debut.

An interlude collects the 11 poems Young wrote between Prismatic Ground and Moderate Fable, most of them previously unpublished. “Guide to New Harmony, Indiana” overlaps with the first chapter of Angel in the Forest and offers a glimpse at what the original ballad version of that work might have looked like. It is one of the few that still rhymes:

You come to this old village by a ferry
Which wheezes and trembles in a spasm,
But the iron clapper by the river clearly
Has called the fisherman across the chasm.

Many of the others are in free verse and stretch out to longer lines than in the earlier poems. One is even in prose: “Flea Circus on Times Square” is a wisecracking hayseed’s letter home from the big city. “At night, the skyscrapers are like great bee hives filled with lights instead of honey.” These are all strong poems, and why they weren’t added to her next book is puzzling.

The 43 poems of Moderate Fable were written during the early years of World War II, concordant with Angel in the Forest. One poem refers explicitly to the war, and a few others dramatize such events as a funeral and a homecoming, but many of the new poems inhabit an abstract, metaphysical plane and are difficult to translate into denotative terms. “A Crystal Principle,” the first poem in the book, begins,

From crucial elements, as light, water, fire, air
Is crystal evolved by the slow dazzle of beads
Cloudless twin moons in true curve, God’s tears
And only tear, as the round dew drops on crimson weeds.

and doesn’t get much clearer after that. The second poem is titled “A High Subjectivity” and insists “Impossible, in crucial analysis, / That man, at his extreme, has not excessively willed // Non-being of being, and being of non-being.” Indeed, some of the poems are so highly subjective that it is difficult to say what they are “about,” which is only to say they require closer reading than her earlier poems did.

But even the most opaque of them offer dopamine hits of bizarre images: “albino nuns with partridge eyes and silk eye lashes, [. . .] choirs of widows veiled in snowlight [. . .] painted Pharaohs on a star exploded / Like a concept” (all from “A High Subjectivity”). Once again the focus is on the natural world, especially animals and birds: there are poems about whales, a white rat, the passengers on Noah’s Ark, a raven, a heron, a rabbit, and the best poem about giraffes I’ve ever seen—easy, since the only other one I’ve read is Roy Fuller’s “The Giraffes,” published the same year. And angels! Angels are everywhere in The Collected Poems, making more than 100 appearances. In the poem “The Angels,” Young sympathetically wonders “O, where, where are the winter grounds of angels / Where like the crested auklets do they nest / And the blue fox shall not discover their stony holes?”

Only a handful of the poems still use rhyme, and Young continues to unfurl longer lines and experiment with spacing. The collection also includes her longest poem, “Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne,” a three-page address to the head of John the Baptist, another study in subjectivity. After all the abstraction and intellectualism, Moderate Fable concludes with the palpable “Winter Scene,” in which snowy Earth is depicted as a bride in a white wedding gown.

A short section titled “Late Poems, 1945” follows, four fine poems in the metaphysical manner of Moderate Fable—the standout is “Proem to Reality,” which parallels the grand theme of Miss MacIntosh—and then nearly 60 pages of “drafts and sketches,” assembled by coeditor Joshua Rothes from the Marguerite Young Papers at Yale: “While undated,” he writes, “they are all very clearly from the period between Prismatic Ground and Moderate Fable.” They are all very clearly the work of a great poet.

I sense that by 1945 Young realized that she had gone as far as she could with poetry. Accepted for publication by the eminent Mark Van Doren, Moderate Fable was well received and won the best poetry book of the year award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, but Angel in the Forest was nominated for the best nonfiction book of the same year—she would have won both had the Academy’s rules allowed it—and the original Reynal & Hitchcock edition went through at least three printings. She must have realized that artful prose provided a wider field and a larger audience than her increasingly sophisticated poetry did. Poetry’s loss was fiction’s gain: that same year, she began composing an epic novel that would be published 20 years later as Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Young admired Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and by adapting a similar open-ended, achronological narrative form with a cast of peculiar characters, she was able to provide a dramatic setting for her poetic themes.

Due to be reissued by Dalkey Archive Press next year, Young’s 1,200-page novel might have used as an epigraph the opening lines of “Elegy,” the last published poem in The Collected Poems: “Reality with universal memory is haunted, / Throughout the universe is memory”—and/or that poem’s penultimate line: “Reality is wild and on the wing.” During her long bus-ride from New England to What Cheer, Iowa, where she hopes to find her nanny Georgia MacIntosh, Vera Cartwheel searches her haunted memory in a vain attempt to distinguish reality from illusion, gradually realizing there is “No reality but consciousness”—as a line in one of Young’s poetry drafts reads. And reality is indeed wild in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling—most of it concerns the quirks and fancies of such characters as Vera’s opium-addicted mother, her cross-dressing adventurer cousin Hannah Freemount-Snowden, the eccentric Spitzer twins, mad Dr. Justice O’Leary and his dead sister, a women’s shoes salesman turned street preacher named Titus Bonebreaker, and other denizens of what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.”

The continuity between the poems and the novel is striking; the novel essentially picks up where The Complete Poems leaves off, not only thematically but also linguistically. Miss MacIntosh’s pronouncement “Only the worm is clothed, and the worm is our little brother, and our own mothers shall not know us. Our nakedness is God’s nakedness” sounds like lines lifted from one of Young’s poems, as do hundreds of other “poetic” lines in the novel, such as “The bus-windows had turned to a cold, streaming greyness as if only the ghost of the world were crying outside,” and, better yet, “Cousin Hannah knew the Alpine and Himalayan abysses [. . .] as she might know, my mother thought now, the mountains of the moon and moon craters like eyes of dead water birds staring through burning clouds and lunar seas of dry winds, seas of echoes. . . .” I suggested earlier that Young’s early poem “The Seeker” could easily be set as prose and inserted in her novel; the same could be done with this stanza from “The Apple Was Mental” for one of the street preacher’s more inspired rants:

For Christ, the mediation process, moves ever between self
And thing-in-itself. Yea, the sick tramp is peacock thousand-eyed
And tentative as that anarchic angel,
A noun which has no corresponding entity in space
 
But is like honey gathered from the atmosphere
Or insects generated out of evening dew
Or say, the wind-impregnated mare
In meadows sloping toward a sea which has no permanence but possibility.

This passage, like “The Seeker,” flows like prose because of enjambment, which Young often used, presaging the lengthy sentences she would compose for the novel. She called them “dragnet” sentences: a long, paratactic sentence that would cast its net into a sea of facts and fancies, ideas and characters, and drag them into unexpected relationships. There's one in Miss MacIntosh that is two pages long.

Animals and nature are as omnipresent in the novel as in the poems. Vera praises “The beauty, the unity of nature [. . .] all the world repeated in the pattern of the rounded eye [. . .] the spot on a peacock’s tail, the eyes gleaming among the tail feathers, the hole through the needle, the center of a flower.” At the conclusion of the novel, she envisions the guests at her wedding: “little Johnny-jump-up and little jack-in-the-pulpit and the snapdragon and four o’clock and whippoorwill and bluejay and little jenny wren and bobolink and woodpecker and little robin redbreast, all the wild flowers and all the birds and little tommy titmouse and the waters and the clouds and the moon and the sun and the stars and the old mule that leaned over the fence. . . .” Though Young spent the second half of her life mostly in New York City, she was born in Indianapolis and never forgot her Midwestern roots.

The Complete Poems (and the forthcoming new edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling) should justify her fans’ conviction that Young is one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.