Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 223, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1916 — What a Real Poet is Really Like [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

What a Real Poet is Really Like

Men t»ho knew James Whitcomb Riley and his work intimately tell something about the great HoosiertPho played upon the heartstrings of a nation H>ith his songs of common folk and manners

■a « OWADAYS a poetic genius doesn’t —I look like one. On the street, you ’ might guess him to be a business man or a lawyer or a preacher or I a photographer. Not since the time of Edgar Allan Poe have real poets worn their hair long—as in the comic pictures —or affected the soulful expression. Nowadays when a man wears his hair like 3ggjSj Spanish moss on a Florida oak he 9bEhl| is suspected of being hard up. And if he exhibits what is supposed to be his soul by certain shifting and staring of his eyes he is pitied as one whose mental gearing has sand in it. Bliss Carman, former editor of the Independent and a poet of note, was one of James Whitcomb Riley’s closest friends. After the Indiana songster’s death on July 23, Carman told much about Riley to Mr. Joyce Kilmer of the New York Times Magazine and Mr. Kilmer in turn told it to the :J. ■, Some 30 years ago Carman was Introduced to the already famous Hoosier. Riley’s keen birdlike eyes surveyed the tall frame of the new and young acquaintance: “Gosh, you’re a stalwart, ain’t ye?” he remarked, grinning. “I guess your parents must have trained you on a trellis.” Then, as reported by Mr. Kilmer, Carman went on to say: “The next time I saw Riley was in Philadelphia. I went to read before the Browning society, and I don’t mind telling you that I was scared to death. When I got out all alone on the stage and saw a thousand people staring up at me I felt more like running away than doing anything else. But when I saw Riley down in the audience, looking at me in his quaint, friendly way, then I felt all right. I wasn’t afraid to read my poetry to Riley. “After the reading was over Riley tucked me under his arm and said: ‘Now, let’s get around to the hotel nnd we’ll take off our shoes and get a chew of tobacco and be comfortable.’ “You know, such remarks as this were all the more piquant because Riley was so very punctilious and scrupuldus in all his personal habits. He always was Immaculately dressed. I never knew him even to make so much of a concession to comfort as to put on a smoking jacket or a lounge coat. But he liked to go to his room and stretch himself on his bed and talk. And he never talked about anything but literature, chiefly poetry. “Riley had a great fund of knowledge of poetry and knew lots of out-of-the-way homely verse. He delighted particularly in ridiculously bad newspaper verse. “Riley liked to read poetry aloud. When I went to his house of an evening, he generally was waiting for me with some favorite book, ready to read aloud.” "What sort of poetry did he prefer?” “His tastes covered a wide range. Two poets to whom he was especially devoted were Longfellow and Swinburne. v * “Riley liked Longfellow’s directness and simplicity. The things that pleased him in Swinburne’s work were the music and the deft craftsmanship. “After Riley had received his degrees from some of the colleges, he seemed to feel that he ought to be known as a poet, rather than as a humorist and writer of dialect verse. He tried hard to live up to the name of poet, and wanted his nonsense rhymes of his vagabondage forgotten. Yet his vernacular verse, or, as he called it, his dialect verse, was his chief contribution to literature. “Riley was just a poet That was all he ever cared to be. He was not interested in anything but poetry. He knew nothing of politic*—he had not voted for 30 years. And as for philosophy, he had nothing but contempt for the modern thinkers. "There was something very pathetic and charming about Riley’s tenacity In holding the serious poet pose. His nonsense was just one of his ways of writing which happened to prove popular; when he got a chance to write in another way bow eagerly he seized It, and how persistently he dung to it! “His last years were the happiest of his life. I think. He had his own car and rode around Indianapolis and its suburbs every day, generally firing with him some friend. He was honored pmi loved, and I think he felt that life had been good to him.' “Riley’s father was a lawyer. His grandfather came to Indiana from Pennsylvania. His grandmother on his mother’s side was Pennsylvania Dutch. His father was Irish. “Riley had many prejudices. He disliked Poe very much. He disliked Poe’s character so much that he could hardly read bis poetry. Of course, lie must have liked Poe’s music and splendid metrical effects. “Of course, yon know the story of Riley’s famous Imitation of Poe? He had taken a position on the staff of an Anderson, Ind., paper, and the pditor at a rival paper kept ridiculing him. Riley - - —-I: - -■ 1

wanted to get even with him, so he wrote his Imitation of Poe, and had it published in a paper in another part of the state with an elaborate story about the discovery of the manuscript. “At once it made a great sensation all over the country. It made; so great a sensation that Riley was terrified, and feared that he would be accused of literary forgery. Meanwhile the editor of the rival paper wrote: ‘No doubt our young friend Riley will belittle this poem and say it is not the work of Poe. But it is Poe, and Poe’s best manner.’ The sensation grew to such proportions that Riley had to confess that he had written the poem. And then the editor of the paper discharged Riley because he had not published It In his paper. “Then the Indianapolis Journal gave him a job, which he held for years. He wrote reams of nonsense verse, and wrote up in verse the shops of the merchants who advertised In the Journal. “Riley’s first book was called ‘The Old Swimmin’ Hole and ’Leven More Poems.' He published it himself. It sold so well that it was soon taken over by -a publisher, and passed through many editions. “Riley’s exquisite penmanship showed the care with which he wrote. Originally he wrote a careless and rather illegible script, but he had so much difficulty In getting the printers to read his writing, and printing his dialect verse correctly, that he took up the study of penmanship. He was careful always to get the dialect of one part of Indiana as distinct'from the dialect of any other part. “ ‘Any man’s character,’ he said, ‘is best remembered, I suppose, by some of his habitual gestures and expressions.’ I remember Riley as very deliberate In his motions, especially in his last years. Smooth shaven, ruddy, weir groomed, he looked like a benign old English bishop more than anything else.” Mr. Don Marquis of the New York Sun aptly considers Riley and his poetry from an entirely different angle. “James Whitcomb Riley,” says he, “was the Companion of fairies In Arcady; for the Hoosier belongs to a race apart. And while some are captured nnd broken to trade, the gentle poef escaped and kept always the vision of hidden things.” With these prefatory remarks the writer goes on with his essay: “There are two sorts of Indianan —the ordinary Indianan, who Is not so very different from tha Ohioan or the Illinoisan, and the Hoosier. “The Hoosier belong not merely to a race apart, but to a separate species. He is human, but with a difference; he is aware of the kinship between humanity and the so-called lower animals (and even the plants and streams) on the one side, and on the other side of the kinship of humanity with the elves. “When the moon turns the mists to sliver and the owls wall and the frogs wake up along the creeks and lakes and the fairies saddle and bridle the fireflies and mount them and go whirring and flashing off in search of airy adventures the Hoosiers steal out of the farmhouses and hamlets and creep down to the bottom lands and dance and sing and cavort under the summer stars. They do so secretly, dodging the mere humans, for secrecy Is the essence of their midnight, whimsical revels. “In the daytime they pretend they are jnst ordinary Indianans; their own brothers and mothers may not realize that they are Hoosiers. , “But in Indiana, as elsewhere, there Is business and the need to attend to it There must have been even In Arcady—somebody owned the flocks and herds of Arcady and turned them Into butcher's meat and leather, and the shepherds only piped on the sufferance of their commercial*

minded masters. These Hoosiers, these wild bards and prancing, long-legged lovers of the moon, are often captured and broken and tamed to trade and industry by the more sordid citizenry. They are yoked to the handle end of the plow, chained to the desk; by the hundreds and thousands they become clerks and salesmen and railroad presidents and novelists and. business men of all sorts. “James Whitcomb Riley was a Hoosier who happily escaped; he was never captured, never enslaved; the things hidden from the rest of us, or revealed only in flashes, remembered but vaguely from the days of our own happy Hoosierdom, he continued to see steadily; he lived among them familiarly to the end, and until the end was their interpreter to us. “ ‘Bud come here to your uncle a spell,’ says Riley in effect, ‘and I’ll show you not only a fairy, but a fairy who has for the moment chosen to be just as much of a Hoosier as the Raggedy Man, or Orphant Annie, or Old Kingry, or the folks at Griggsby Station.’ “The critics and the learned doctors of literature are already debating as to whether Riley had imagination or only fancy. (It would be a terrible calamity to some of them if they said it was imagination and it was officially declared later to be merely fancy; that is the sort of mistake that damns a critic and makes the sons and grandsons of critics meek, hacked, apolo. getic young men.) And doubtless the point is ex* ceedingly important. For if a poet has imagination they say his work is significant. And if he has only fancy his work is not significant. “The chief merit of Riley’s dialect verse—which is the most popular part of his production and the part with which the critics chiefly concern themselves —Is its effectiveness as a medium for character portrayal. Whimsical, lovable, homely, racy, quaint, salty, pathetic, humorous, tender are his dialect poems; essentially, he has shown us life as a superior writer of pros# sketches might do, adding the charm of his lyricism. “But, personally, we never like him so well as when he Is writing sheer moonlight and music. Probably no poet who ever wrote English—certainly no American poet—got more luscious language than Riley. A sweetness that Is not so sugary that it cloys, having always a winy tang. For instance, from *The Flying Islands of the Night:’ ‘. . .in lost hours of lute and song, When he was but a prince—I but a mouth For him to lift up srlpplngly and drain To his most ultimate of stammering sobs And maudlin wanderings of blinded breath ’ “There Is no better evidence of the genuineness of Riley’s sentiment, particularly in the dialect poems, than the discretion with which he touches the pathetic chord when he touches it j»t all. One of the most popular poems he ever wrote was ‘Old-Fashioned Roses,’ and one word too much, one pressure the least bit too insistent, would have made the thing as offensive as a vaudeville ballad. The taste which told him to be simple and the sincerity which begat th* taste save the verses from the reproach. “His vernes for children and about children could only have been written by a man whose love and understanding of children was real, for children are quick to detect and repudiate any thing of the sort that is ‘pumped up’ for effect; and they contributed enormously to the general feeling of affection for him. The regard of thl children was in a way a Testimonial to his pen sisting youthfulness of .spirit; he was still their playmate; perhaps it is an earnest of 1 minor-' tallty. If immortality can be. Certainly love endures longer than anything else, and this ntao with the childlike sweetness in his soul fMf from us loved as fewjtnen have been."