Реферат на тему On Sadakichi Hartmann
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On Sadakichi Hartmann’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper
Marshall Van Deusen
Hartmann’s poetry too was touched by the symbolist influence. In 1890, the year Merrill
published Pastels in Prose, Hartmann published a broadside of seven short prose
poems of his own, written from 1886 to 1889. Although these Poems show nothing
like the inscrutable symbolist image or the packed Mallarm?an syntax straining against
the limits of language or Rimbaud’s d?r?glement of the senses, they do, in
their melancholy tendency toward le r?ve, their faint synaesthetic effects, and
the Baudelairean vision of the city (in "Finita Commedia"), echo, if not the
symbolist achievement, then the mood of what Hartmann himself called the
"Decadence." He sent a copy of his broadside to Whitman, though clearly these
poems, slight though they are, define a sharp divergence from his Whitmanesque exuberance
of three years before. He included four of them in a manuscript copy of ten "Early
Poems" (1891).
In 1898 Hartmann prepared "in one copy de luxe" "Naked Ghosts," his
most ambitious poetic effort to date. Inscribed on the title page "TO ST?PHANE
MALLARM? … WITH EVERY SENTIMENT OF REGARD AND RESPECT," the collection concludes
with a poem, "To St?phane Mallarm?: a Strain in Red," which celebrates in
religious and sensual language the poet’s savoring with "eager tongue" and
"wanton lips" a wine which is "the blood of roses," offered in the
holy "chalice" of art. The occasion is sacrificial and celebratory. The 1898
edition of "Naked Ghosts" is filled with Hartmann’s mannered version of
symbolist language, as in the poem beginning, "Cyanogen seas are surging on/fierce
cinnabarine strands, where/white amazons are marching/through the radiance of the
sands." And there is more of the same in a much altered unpublished edition of
"Naked Ghosts" dated 1903. "Oh, Miasmic Swamps of Southern Climes" is
an example. But Hartmann included in the later edition two Whitmanesque poems written in
1887, one of them echoing in its title, "Oh, to Create!!," the poem Whitman gave
to Hartmann in 1884. But though Hartmann continued throughout his life his critical
advocacy of Whitman’s poetry, the older poet’s influence on Hartmann’s poetic practice has
disappeared completely in his next collection of verse, Drifting Flowers of the Sea
and Other Poems, published in a manuscript edition of 160 copies in 1904.
The language of Drifting Flowers is much less flamboyant than the language of
"Naked Ghosts," and formally the verse is much more closely patterned, though
thematically Hartmann is still concerned with lost love and lost innocence and with the
dreamy, nostalgic exploration of l’inconscient, especially through imagery of the
sea. "Nocturne" is an example. It is written in rhyming quatrains, except that
the last stanza has six lines; the second line of each quatrain becomes the first line of
the following one; and the final stanza repeats lines from all the preceding ones. The
opening sets the tone:
Upon the silent sea-swept land
The dreams of night fall soft and gray,
The waves fade on the jewelled sand
Like some lost hope of yesterday.
The intricate patterning of such poems as "Nocturne" seems to have been
congenial to Hartmann’s developing poetic sensibility. In this connection it is
interesting to note that he included in Drifting Flowers six adaptations (rhyme
added) of the metrically complicated five-line Japanese tanka. He had published in 1904 in
the Reader Magazine an article on "The Japanese Conception of
Poetry,"in which he praised the brevity and concentration of the "melancholy
musings" characteristic of tanka and described the technical requirements of this and
other Japanese forms "exactly fashioned" to discipline the
"suggestiveness" of the emotions evoked. Such poems seek to be pictorial yet
evocative: the poet "never becomes one with nature" but always insists on the
primacy of the human response. His is the craft, but the elliptical nature of what he has
"fashioned" demands that the reader’s response complete the poem. Echoing the
title and themes of Drifting Flowers, Hartmann offers as an example of the method
an image in which the poet "wishes that the white breakers far out on the sea were
flowers that would drift to his lady love."
In 1915 Guido Bruno devoted most of the November issue of his magazine Greenwich
Village to articles by and about Hartmann as "the King of Bohemia." And as
if to prove a point about the ways of bohemian royalty, Hartmann published in the June
1915 issue of Bruno Chap Books "Tanka, Haikai, Fourteen Japanese
Rhythms." (Actually there were only thirteen.) Hartmann used the term haikai
here and in his article on Japanese poetry for what modern specialists prefer to call
haiku: that is, a poem of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively, as
distinguished from the five-line linked stanzas called haikai. In any case
Hartmann’s own tanka and haiku fit the specifications he laid down for these forms in his
1904 essay. Their concentration succeeds admirably in controlling the sentimentality that
often threatens to invade his longer poems. Hartmann published revised collections
of his tanka and haiku in 1916, 1920, 1926, and 1933 (eleven copies); the last two
editions, entitled Japanese Rhythms, also included poems in the four-line dodoitsu
form. Some of the verses were original and some were adaptations from the Japanese; the
1933 edition, for example, includes Hartmann’s versions of the well-known haiku by Basho
about the temple bells, the crow on a withered branch, and the frog jumping into a pond.
Hartmann’s article on Japanese poetry seems to antedate the French vogue for haiku
beginning about 1905 and the interest of the American imagists beginning about 1910; his
own haiku came out almost ten years before the haiku competition organized by the Nouvelle
Revue Francaise in 1924. In any case, it is characteristic that he was in the
vanguard in the United States in making available foreign forms of art and seeking to
domesticate them in the New World, perhaps helping to complete the circuit from West to
East described in Whitman’s "Passage to India."
In a sense Hartmann heard what he wanted to hear in the Japanese rhythms he described
in 1904. Among other things, he heard "Lamentations over the uncertainties of life
which sound like a faint echo of Omar Khayyam’s rose-scented quatrains." In 1913 in
Saint Louis he published My Rubaiyat, which was republished in 1916 as one of the
Bruno Chap Books ; also in 1916 he brought out in San Francisco a "third
revised edition." Where he added rhyme to his Japanese poems, he deleted it from his
Rubaiyat; and he wrote, not in quatrains, but in six-line stanzas–seventy-five of them.
Excerpted from a longer essay in Peter Quartermain, ed. Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Vol. 54. Copyright 1987 by the Gale Group.