New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1928, The Legend of Quincibald. From the introduction:

To anticipate criticism has generally been considered poor judgment on the part of a writer, and may be so in this instance. To the reader who is by nature hostile to the methods I have chosen, I have nothing to say whether of praise or blame. He has his limitation as I have mine. But to the reader who has some disposition to discover in these verses certain aspects of his own mystery, I should like to say a word.

This poem is an attempt to deal with the stuff of personality in the only way in which that stuff can be dealt with — that is to say, symbolically. The persons and things which have a place in the poem, have that place because no simpler expression will perform their function. I wish it could, but for the present at least such simplicity is impossible. A reader who surrenders himself to the succession and flow of the images, will, I think, find a meaning in the poem, and that no light one. A reader who endeavors to torture the symbolism into allegory, and the allegory into what he would call plain English, will find what I never meant, and what in point of fact means nothing. If he desires to do this I cannot stop him, and indeed have failed as far as he is concerned. But I hope with all my heart that there will be readers who, by experience painful or otherwise, have learned that at times fantasy is more practical than logic, and that a mechanical sorites can be the most deadly enemy of truth. Such persons will I hope find in this poem an order of things congenial to their imagination within and to their contact with the world without. They may not be better than others, but they are a great deal luckier.

New at IWP Books: Arthur Guiterman, 1920, Chips of the Jade: Being Chinese Proverbs With More Folk-Sayings From Hindustan and Other Oriental Countries.

Eight Sailors; Seven want to steer.
That Junk won’t come to Port, I fear.

Fear not lest Men say Evil Things of you,
But fear to do the Ill they say you do.

This One Makes a Net,
 That One stands and wishes;
Would you like to bet
 Which One gets the Fishes?

Four Words upon the Prison Gate
 Are written: “These Repent Too Late.”

Since Riches lead to Vice,
 And Poverty to Theft,
Outside of Paradise
 Is any Virtue left?

Recorded Words are Fetters;
 When Angry, don’t write Letters.

The New will last perhaps a score
 Of Days; the Old, a Year or more.

The Street will be as clean as Heaven’s Floor
When Each Man sweeps before his Own Front Door.

A Day, or a Minute? A Year or a Moon?
Now, which does he mean when he says, “Pretty soon!”

Small Ills are the Fountains
 Of most of our Groans.
Men trip not on Mountains,
 They stumble on Stones.

“My Wisdom aids the World!” — How sweet
 That Secret Thought of Great and Small!
The Sea-gull sleeps with Upturned Feet
 To catch the Sky when that shall fall.

My Home is a Shell
 With an Empty Shelf!
Oh, bring me a Well
 And I’ll drown myself!

Avoid Suspicion: When you’re walking through
Your Neighbor’s Melon-patch, don’t tie your Shoe.

Who dares not hoist the sail till all agree
 That Danger’s dead, will never put to Sea.

I’ll make it Rain as soon as Men
 Will all agree and tell me when.

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1935, The Voyage of Autoleon: A Fanstatic Epic.

………………………………..
Till Leonymus cried out: “To this self-pity, how much longer will you cleave?
“Though the universe die round us not vain is the passion of the soul.
“Without the wound, it may be the wounded man could never be whole.
“Though Achilles were a cowardly hireling, the fair Helen but a jade,
“And our souls undone for that, the dream is in us whereby they are remade.
“To the height and the depth the wound draws me. Thrice blessed the spear.
“Our hope was most false in the great battle. So now is the fear
“That has smitten us all and has robbed us of all beauty and worth.
“For here once was beauty. The Undying shall not perish from the earth.
“It shall live in a song or in a gesture, in a sorrow that is sore,
“Or haply in their vision that endeavor to discover it once more.”
And we pushed out the galley from the sea-beach and departed from the shore.
………………………………..

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1934, Dream and Action, a retelling in ottava rima of some episodes from the life of Arthur Rimbaud. The opening stanzas:

Any one who thinks this work should correspond
With the actual facts behind has my permission
To go to Sheol and all points beyond,
And to continue there in such condition
As Satan may determine, who is fond
Of suchlike persons, whom the obstetrician,
Unfortunately skilful, at their birth
Should have prevented from cumbering the earth.

When one becomes entangled in an art,
All sorts of dreadful things may supervene.
You comprehend the scheme only in part,
Little suspecting what that part may mean.
The mental lapse, worse yet, defect of heart
Shatter conception, vitiate the scene
That was to carry out the grand effect.
O broken heart! O wretched intellect!

So with my story of Arthur Rimbaud,
A poet doomed to ultimate renown,
Whose poetry you probably don’t know,
Though that won’t hurt him. I’ve ventured to set down
My views about him, which partly may be so.
He was the flower, the glory, and the crown
Of France — a child that knew all lights and heats
Of the spirit, worthy to have stood with Keats.

From Ulug Beg by Leonard Bacon (“Autolycus”):

Women know too much. Out of their wombs we come
From nowhere in particular, and go —
Whither? — The best authorities are dumb
Upon this question since they do not know,
Though there are various theories venturesome.
See Palladini, Oliver Lodge and Co.
But whether death await us or survival,
Women have lots to do with our arrival.

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1938, Bullinger Bound and Other Poems.

John Jay Chapman

Gleaming courage without fault,
When the night has come, must halt.
Knight of the single hand,
Star-touching, star-crossed,
Even in this land
It is not lost.

Dangerous Acquaintance

Sir William Batten, Sir William Penn,
And Sir John Minnes were Navy men.
They had chicken-livers and pasty faces
And their principal interest was their places.
Their intellects resembled a sheep’s
And they were detested by Samuel Pepys,
Who set it down as one in the face of God
In the time of the second Charles by the grace of God.
Sir William Batten no doubt was shady.
His wife wasn’t pleasant to Pepys’s Lady.
Sir William Penn, though his son turned Quaker,
After all had taken Jamaica.
And Sir John Minnes, though he wasn’t able,
Was excellent company at table.
There is a question which gives me the creeps:
Am I acquainted with Samuel Pepys?
That chap I beat in a lawsuit recently,
Is he handling my character rather indecently;
Hitting me off in phrases too fiery
For my satisfaction in some damned diary?
I can see his pen on the white page flickering:
“Bacon was there. Hence the usual bickering.
“It’s perfectly clear that he thinks he’s funny,
“But if he’s amusing, then I’m Gene Tunney.”
With the further addition nothing can soften,
“Why does he come to the club so often?”
He’s probably working while we are sleeping.
Ten to one Samuel Pepys is peeping.
Can you feel the edge of his scimitar?
He sees us not as we think we are.
We may be a good deal better perhaps.
We may, in fact, be excellent chaps.
He may not reach our heights and our deeps —
But he sees what he sees. What we sow he reaps.
And one cannot argue with Samuel Pepys.

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1932, The Furiso.

………………………..
Pio Speranza at Trascara sat
At his drugstore-door, slowly recovering from
One of the worst of modern ailments that
Can hit a hero — shell-shock. He would go numb
At moments, since that bomb had knocked him flat,
And foam at the mouth — a little — and be dumb,
And a prey to loathly reflexes, until
He could beat ’em by an effort of the will

Which was wont to wander ever so far away,
Leaving him feeling weak and insecure
And comfortless, afraid of night and day
And people, undefended and unsure.
Even his wife had got at times that grey
Look all things had, which he could not endure.
But her eyes summoned something to their deep.
And sometimes in her bosom there was sleep,

When came queer visions of a ship that sailed
Somewhere. Bound whither? His mind, it seemed, was tired.
The question, whatever it implied, entailed
Effort he could not make, though he desired
To know. Once was a spirit-ship. He quailed
Before an enigma. Perhaps the thing had fired
His nature once — before he was like this,
Afraid, and on the edge of an abyss.

He had a cigarette, he had the paper,
And did not know quite what to do with either,
If his leaping nerves were always going to caper.
But will came from deep waters for a breather,
And made him feel she was once more the shaper
Of his fortune, trampling vast despair beneath her.
He strove to read. With an effort greater yet
He lighted the vibrating cigarette.
………………………..

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon (“Autolycus”), 1923, Ulug Beg: An Epic Poem.

……………………………….
Words can be terrible things. They overthrow
Their maker, trapped in the net of his own fallacies.
They overwhelm the high and crush the low.
They burn the tenement and gut the palaces.
They check the rapid and they speed the slow.
They quicken thought, or smite it with paralysis,
And they have viper fangs and vampire wings.
A rhymester knows. Words can be terrible things.

Sometimes when they have leagued themselves with fact,
They mean necessity and eternal fate.
But when with mere ideas they strike the pact,
They shrivel down to tattered drivel, and prate
Unmeaning, uninforming, inexact.
And this has been so much the case of late,
That hunger and ferocious hatred rip
The very warp of human fellowship.

Therefore I hate the conversation flingers,
The Utopiasters, formulary-swallowers,
The paper supermen and slogan-singers,
The imbecile leaders and the idiot followers,
The clock-reversers, the millennium-bringers,
And all the low-grade morons who are wallowers
In the slough of theoretic inebriety,
And style themselves the saviors of society.

Each party gives me the same sort of pain,
Whether it be the radical or conservative,
Because, in both, the fluids of the brain
Run mainly undertaker’s ripe preservative.
They swop and chop and lie and lie again,
And each has a programme that a mule would swerve at if
It were displayed before him where he browses.
Programme! Dear Christ! A plague on both your houses.
……………………………….

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1936, Rhyme and Punishment.

If Rupert Brooke Were Alive

If Rupert Brooke were alive,
You Shelleys of the New Incompetence,
How on earth could you survive
The bright blast of his humor and his sense?
Do you think that your acrostics and charades
Would help you meet his eye,
However heroically you die
Vicariously on Viennese barricades?
You have called him sentimental,
You have said his life was wasted,
An episode incidental
To economic error
That begat the time’s terror,
But I say you lie.
You could not have tasted
Of his cup one least drop.
Your pulse would stop,
Your thin blood dry,
Before you undertook to stub
One of your precious toes outside a Chelsea pub.
“What can we do?” you cry
And I reply to you,
(It’s a sensible reply)
“Don’t cry, ‘What can we do?’
Don’t try to exploit
The time’s strife and pain,
However brilliant your brain,
Your hand however adroit.
If the trouble be your concern,
Strike in! Strike in to the struggle,
Prepared to die and burn,
But don’t juggle
Catch-phrases, the tail-end slang
Of an economic harangue.
They lose their stinging perfume,
Whatever they had of tang,
In an Oxford common-room.
Words! A brave man will do without ’em,
The fighting words, unless
He is willing to bear the uttermost distress
In a stand-up, knock-down, drag-out battle about ’em.
In which case
He may without loss of face
Discuss the projects ill-conceived
Of men who died for ideas they once had believed.”

Horace

To him was granted as to perhaps no other
Hyblaean honey from daily things to draw,
To see anfractuosities of his brother,
And with strange kindness mock at what he saw,

So that the morning stars laughed in their stations
At the living phrases arrowy and satiric,
Although wild grief troubled the constellations
That heard the water-clear essential lyric.

He is safe for ever where poetasters plague no
Barbaric discord from unfamiliar strings,
For ever, as once he was, bonae sub regno
Cynarae, at ease with Gods and Men and Things.

No Retreat

When I was a boy there were large
Calm regions where civilized man
Could withdraw according to plan
And ignore the savage discharge
Of the passions of the herd.
If not in Paris, why then
In Dresden or Florence. But men
Aren’t like that now. A word
Has been uttered, a curse pronounced,
And you have to shoot your way
Up or down the Rue de la Paix,
Where the Red and the Black have pounced
On the social corpse in decay.
I should like to be (should not you?)
Desirous and hedonistic,
Oblivious of the statistic
And economic view.
I confess without regret
That it hasn’t convinced me yet.
You know — a grain of salt,
One must take it once in a way
When one swallows a cliché.
Perhaps it’s my own fault.
But 1980 may utter
Thought of a different trend
And all our very best butter
Come to a greasy end.
The lovely irrational planet
Doubtless will haver along
Between a thought and a song,
Half aetherial fire, half granite.
And men will grieve alone
And gape at the unknown
And not know that “what they know
Is seldom so.”

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1940, Sunderland Capture and Other Poems.

Lauro de Bosis

Laughed by his own truth in the teeth of fate,
He rose like his own Icarus and fell,
The liberator who arrived too late.
Yet who is he dare say he did not well?

Over Rome towering, unafraid he came,
Thundering his challenge from the Autumn cloud.
And they who took it up name not his name —
No man has strength to cope with the uncowed.

Into the darkness, whether or no shot down,
What skill to ask? Or who is it that cares?
In the abyss he vanished with the crown
That only the triumphant spirit wears.

And none henceforth shall dare forget this thing
While dream and truth subsist, or wreath and wing.