The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

The American Rhythm, 1930

The American Rhythm, 1930 In the 1930 edition of The American Rhythm, Austin deleted six poems from the “Amerindian Songs” section and added fifteen new “re-expressions” to make a total of forty-two “Amerindian Songs.” She also added two new sections to the book: “Magic Formulas from the Cherokee” and “Tribal Lays.” These new sections are “re-expressions,” too, closely aligned with sources in the publications of the American Bureau of Ethnology, harking back to the work of earlier ethnologists such as James Mooney, Pliny Earle Goddard , Frank Hamilton Cushing, and Francis La Flesche . She added a number of explanatory footnotes, and she could claim in Earth Horizon that the new edition of The American Rhythm was “a complete edition” and that “now there is no American anthology that does not quote it, and few Western poets who do not filch from it. Even Amy Lowell did that, but she had the grace to blush when I referred to it” (345). All of Austin’s original poems in the “Songs in the American Manner” section were deleted. Thus Austin seems to have considered the 1930 edition of The American Rhythm an anthology of Native American poems, not as a collection of her own poetry. In the new edition of The American Rhythm, Austin provided some eighteen pages of “Addenda” for the introduction. In the first addendum to the 1930 110 introduction, Austin updates her list of modern heirs to American landscape and Amerindian song, focusing on the role of abstraction in dance, visual and plastic arts, and poetry. She particularly notes the poetry of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence , and Robinson Jeffers in relation to abstract expression, and, as in the 1923 edition, she praises Sandburg, Frost, and Lindsay for the “growing conformity” of their work to their specific landscapes (AR 67). Many readers today will find this 1930 list more predictably modernist than Austin’s 1923 lists. In the first third of the twentieth century, however, and particularly in the years surrounding World War I, Masters, Lindsay, and Sandburg—Midwesterners all—were strongly associated with a new, democratic poetry that evoked the common life of American farmers and laborers. Frost was especially innovative in his vigorous colloquial language. Lawrence had moved to Taos, New Mexico, in 1922, writing his Studies in Classic American Literature during the two years he stayed there, so he was a personal acquaintance of Austin. For most of these writers, the freeverse form of their major work firmly placed them in the tradition of Whitman and marked them as writing avant-garde poetry. Meanwhile , the major works of high modernists like Pound, Eliot, and Cummings appeared after the first edition of The American Rhythm was published, while Robinson Jeffers’s characteristic poetry of California dates from the late 1920s and after. David Perkins discusses these poets in his excellent history of modern American and English poetry, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: Belknap, 1976). The second addendum to the 1930 edition is Austin’s increased emphasis on the magic power of Amerindian songs. She had already written on the subject in the introduction to Path on the Rainbow, and the topic looms large in the early essay, “The Song Makers,” from 1911. In “The Song Makers,” Austin dramatizes an evening of conversation with Kern River Jim and Tinnemaha, a medicine man of the Owens Valley Paiute tribe. Tinnemaha teaches Austin the role of dance in the ceremonial songs of the Paiute: “‘We dance always,’ 111 said he. ‘It is the shortest road to the Friend of the Soul of Man’” (MASW, 256). Eventually Austin states her epiphany: Good Medicine! There I had the whole business of songmakers; painted songs, printed songs, or whatever; not to preach, not to please merely, but to make a short road to the mood of power, to touch the Friend. But you had by Tinnemaha’s account to touch him yourself first, to swing up by the skirts of the Great Moment and to let down a hand to stumbling men. (MASW, 258) Tinnemaha makes an important appearance in the 1930 edition of The American Rhythm, reciting for Austin the cycle of twin brother tales, the last of which she reproduces in a prose translation (AR, 143–46). Austin describes the performance in detail, even though she admits that it was “early...