Anne Harding Woodworth

Trickery and Poetry

The year is 1939. There are two publications of that year that have recently caught my attention. But before I get to them, I should reveal my distaste for celebrity worship. We all know that American society today is mired in the idolization of mere mortals. And often the idols themselves believe in their own superiority to other mortals. This is nothing new, and in 1939 excessive pride, or hubris, which has been a part of human nature throughout the millennia, was alive and well. Dolus, god of trickery, was too.

One publication from June, 1939, stands out for me. It is Vol. LIV, No. III of Poetry magazine, which was then no longer under the deft hand of its founder Harriet Monroe (1860-1936). The Editor was George Dillon; the Associate Editor, Peter De Vries. And to drop a name, Thorton Wilder was appointed to an “Associate Committee” at Poetry in 1937.

It’s name dropping that brings me to another 1939 publication that interests me: Vol. I, of Nicholas Murray Butler’s two-volume autobiography called Across the Busy Years. Butler (1862-1947) was president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945. (He also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, which he shared with Jane Addams. Two more disparate types would be hard to imagine.)

Butler makes it clear from the opening pages of Vol. I, published by Scribner’s—pages that most of us would probably call an “Introduction” or a “Preface,” but which Butler called an “Apologia,” something an author might write in defense of a belief or a position—that he was very proud of himself, his British heritage, his accomplishments, and, above all, the people he knew. Well, perhaps Butler was defending himself as a keeper of “intimate revelations of international affairs and famous personalities from 1893 to 1939,” as Vol. II, published in 1940, boasts on the front of the jacket. In Vol. I Butler refers unabashedly to his “impressive list of friends and acquaintances.” (p. 13)

When I begin to recall those truly great minds and spirits which it has been my good fortune to meet and to know, often very intimately, I am astounded at the length and high significance of the list. (p. 3)

And on the next page, he writes,

[I]t has been my happy fortune to meet, to talk with and often to know in warm friendship almost every man of light and leading who has lived in the world during the past half-century.( p. 4)

Butler may have been more impressed with his friends and acquaintances than others might have been, but I’ll get to that. In his Apologia he drops names of the men who influenced him or with whom he was connected in his long career. He wants us to know that he had a talent to get unusual information out of the famous. He sat with Admiral Peary, for instance, in a small company (of men, one assumes); and, after hearing an account of Peary’s successful North Pole expedition, Butler directed the conversation with questions, gleaning information Peary might not have considered of interest to others. What type of underwear did you wear? How did you sleep? How did you prepare food? And it was all because of his—Butler’s—questions that the group heard details extremely fascinating to those outside of the Arctic experience. I will grant Butler that point, although the pride of bringing out such vivid conversation verged on hubris.

Autobiography he compares to a “well-focused photograph”; biography, to a “fortunate portrait or noble statue.” (Vol. I, p. 3) And sure enough, he combines the thought about the two genres into one by using a portrait of himself in Vol. I, painted in 1925 by the great Irish portraitist for the well-to-do, Sir William Orpen.

Among the renowned British he knew—and whose names he drops—were Mr. Gladstone and every prime minister since Gladstone, except Lord Salisbury and Andrew Bonar Law. He knew Lloyd George, and he knew lords and earls. As for men of letters, he claims to have known Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Of course, he knew Pope Leo XIII, but, alas, the pope wasn’t a Brit.

Among the notable churchmen I greatly value my warm friendship with, the Archbishop of Canterbury . . . (p. 7)

Despite being the consummate Anglophile, he does drop names of Americans he knew—the likes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain. And what about U.S. presidents? Well, there was Rutherford B. Hayes, for instance, but only after Hayes had left the White House; Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, and of course Teddy Roosevelt, “whose close personal friend I was, as well as most intimate political adviser from 1898-1908 . . .” (p. 11) Roosevelt “urged high public office upon me again and again.” (p. 11) Then there was Taft, along with Coolidge and Harding. And of Woodrow Wilson he writes:

I could understand and appreciate his intellect and his power of speech, but I never was able to feel confidence in his mental processes or in his standards of judgment.” (p. 12)

This begs questions of whether the feeling was mutual. We’ll never know. But enough name-dropping. Let’s get back to that issue of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, as it was called in those days. There were fourteen poetry contributors, of which seven were women. How about that for equality? This issue—June 1939—featured W. H. Auden, among other poets whose names one might not readily recognize, although there was one other with which I was familiar, the classicist and poet Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969).

I know of Humphries, a classicist, because when I was at Smith College in the sixties, very much involved in the classics, Humphries was teaching at nearby Amherst College. He was a graduate of Amherst, class of 1915, and he taught there from 1957-1965. When my husband Fred (whom I didn’t know at the time) was a sophomore at Amherst, he took a humanities course given by Professor Humphries, who was known on the all-male campus to be a lover of soccer and baseball.

But in 1939, in his mid-40s, some years before he taught at Amherst, Humphries was traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico and Europe, according to Poetry’s “Notes on Contributors.” He had one book of poems and was working on a translation of Lorca’s poetry. His poem in the June 1939 issue of Poetry is called “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion,” an ode being a poem of praise. Parenthetically, Humphries explains to his reader that the ode was “[w]ritten in the tradition that there must be an average of one classical allusion to the line, and that the meter must be unrhymed iambic pentameter.” The poem consists of 32 lines, almost faithful to what I take to be Humphries’ invented “tradition.” Perhaps he calls it a “draft” because not every line has yet the required allusion.

The first line of the ode—“Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again”—implies (ironically) that this might be an ode to hubris itself, which brings on the “Blight of human [and divine] woe.” In mythology, Niobe boasts to the Titan goddess Leto, about her fecundity in producing seven daughters and seven sons. Leto is the mother of only two children, the twins Apollo and Artemis. Being a powerful Titan, Leto punishes Niobe for her extreme pride by having the twins kill all fourteen of Niobe’s children. Niobe turns to “chill stone,” which Humphries evokes in the second line. He goes on to make one classical allusion after another, line after line (except for a few), be it divinity, mythological creature or place. Humphries refers to the ill-fated hunter Actaeon, who was changed into a stag and torn apart by his own dogs. He mentions the hound of Molossus and the dogs Laelaps and Ladon, ending the second stanza, “the great dogs of evil bay the world.” He nods perhaps dejectedly to the Muses.

But life goes on, despite the dogs of evil. “The mind of man still keeps its argosies,” he writes, which is perhaps the turn, or the volta, in the poem. Helen “wakes her tower,” Echo replies, and the nightingale sings. The seas are filled with ships, perhaps returning from the Trojan War, and stories will be told.

As Humphries approaches the end of his ode, the last three lines read:

And so for us who raise Athene’s torch
Sufficient be her message in this hour:
Sons of Columbia, awake, arise!

Columbia? The red-white-and-blue goddess, spirit of the United States of America? Or perhaps the gem of the ocean? What is Humphries doing with this word, taken from the now less noticed Christopher Columbus? It turns out that Humphries was compelled to let his opinion of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, be known in the esteemed pages of Poetry.

This contribution to Poetry is an acrostic poem. If you read the first letter of each line, you discover that the odist wrote, “Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass.” (The lack of an apostrophe for the possessive is Humphries’ poetic license.) It seems that the editors of Poetry, though giving equal opportunity to female poet-contributors, sometimes had deficits in their reading of material that came their way. But I think it would have taken multiple editorial readings—four, five, or six—which editors seldom have time for, to catch Humphries’ ruse, especially with Dolus playing in the wings, as he always is.

Clearly, the poem becomes quite the opposite of an ode. When the editors at Poetry discovered they’d been tricked—and I don’t know how soon after publication they did—the journal issued an apology (not an apologia) to its readers and, I imagine, to the eminent Mr. Butler himself. However, I think we can rightfully say that Mr. Butler, name-dropper extraordinaire, may have been, for some, what those initial letters portrayed him to be. For others, not. We’ll never know. Hubris has a way of being forgotten, like editorial oversights. The years pass, and good journals survive beautifully.

Poetry blackballed the poet Rolfe Humphries from 1939 to 1941, a light sentence for a very well-executed stunt.

Dolus, we salute you.