(Ed. note: This is Part II of Chester Johnson's series about Henri Faust. You can read Part I here.)
Around the same time, across the Big Muddy, another poet and
writer of about the same age as Spencer didn’t seem to be bothered at all by the
appellation of “poet” or “writer.” While Spencer was representing Drew County
in the Arkansas legislature during the early 1920s, William Faulkner, future
griot of the Delta and permutated poet, held the only civilian public service office
he appears to have ever had – postmaster for the University of Mississippi – a
position from which, after a couple of years, he would be summarily fired for
drinking and writing on the job, for cronyism and for often simply throwing
away pieces of mail.
Faulkner,
artist and quintessential observer, apparently had no desire whatsoever to be
party to the power fulcrum; Spencer would, on the other hand, exhibit a
commitment to public service throughout his life, though reconciliation between
the artistic life and a pragmatic, political one proved uneasy, to wit: Henri
Faust.
A reader of
poetry is always tempted to understand a poem from the perceived stylistic
influences on the poet that occurred at the time of the poem’s creation, in
order to put the particular verse in some kind of apprehended, but not always
accurate context – for one can become overzealous in and overreliant on this seemingly
logical pattern of examining a poet’s work; a good poet is normally not as
predictable as we anticipate her or him to be. Notwithstanding the limitations
of this approach, by probing Spencer’s verse in Half-Light and Overtones,
it becomes apparent from both the work itself and other information that the
Fugitives and related Southern Agrarian poets, the especially talented bevy of
literati then present at Vanderbilt, influenced his poetry, both in style and
theme. John Crowe Ransom, Donald
Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren were several of the better known and
more important members of the group, which defended formal structures in poetry
and agrarian values against industrialization – the latter frequently creating
poetic themes of farmland and nature. A quatrain of the poem, “Entreaty Of The
Dark Lover,” from Spencer’s Yale prize volume illustrates the canon. It is
helpful to know that the poem plays against a backdrop of momentary solitude in
nature.
“Enter into my dark where all of sound
Exists within the sepulchers of mind,
Reverberate, and infinitely winds
Its music where the plangent quiet is found.”
Here, Spencer, of course, complies with the traditional form
of iambic pentameter for all four lines and a regular heavy rhyme scheme at the
endings for the first and fourth lines.
The rest of the five quatrain poem is so ordered. The Fugitives would
have been proud.
The Nashville
poets gave Spencer advocacy and encouragement. For example, Donald Davidson
said of Spencer in the Nashville
Tennessean, with a slightly mocking tone, but with reassuring humor for the
young poet, “We have just learned that a poet has been elected to the Arkansas
legislature, and a good poet he is. Does
the Arkansas citizenry know that he writes poetry?” In addition, The Fugitive, literary journal of the
Vanderbilt group, published several of Spencer’s poems.
to be continued . . .