This Mixture is the Better Art: John Dewey’s Poems

Poetry Forum "This Mixture is the Better Art:" John Dewey's Poems Richard Gibboney A.V. Christie It's interesting to think about John Dewey's frame of mind as he sat at his desk at Columbia crafting, then typing up poems which, when complete, he consistently consigned to his trash can. It is clear, looking at the 101 poems in Jo Ann Boydston's volume, (fished, many of them, from that same trashcan by a janitor with a long view), that he was a student of poetry, an admirer of its methods and possibilities. He had no wish, however, that his own poems be part of his collected, known writings. But here they are to be looked at-as unfair as that may seem and as adamant as Dewey was on the matter. So what could he have sought and gained in the act of writing poems? And what did he so keenly and fully accomplish in the process of their writing that rendered any final product unnecessary to him? Or was his discarding them just a way to hide his poetic, emotional side and thus show the intellectual side that characterized his academic prose? These poems are in many ways so purely personal and modest in their ambitions, so purely about language and ordinary life, feeling and practice, so unfettered by an eye toward worldly prominence or acclaim-and that sure is refreshing. But there's a quiet ambition at work, too, a dedication to exploring poetry's nature. At times the poems seem Dewey's satta voce escape from the dungeon of academic writing-the antidote. Or are they Dewey's private tutorial to reveal and educate his emotional side? In his 101 poems you can easily sense Dewey's larger, less emotional preoccupation. He is trying to bridge some dichotomy: Can emotion and the mind be wedded into a single form, need they remain distinct? He seems very intrigued at how he can resolve into a unity his experience, his thought, his emotion and whether poetry is the vehicle for that pursuit. All very process-oriented and surely, then, it is not fair to put undue critical pressure on thefinal poem themselves. Most of them, however, are pleasing and well-made. Sure, there's occasional bombast or, at times, cramped and rigid rhyme schemes, but these too mark any more famous poet's oeuvre. What these poems display ultimately is a wonderfully arrived at ease with the poem as a form and an honesty of expression that may have just felt too vulnerable or revealing for Dewey to share. The poems were written between 1911 and 1928. (Each poem is more specifically dated by matching typewriter typeface to other notes/lectures typed on the same typewriting machine.) For us Dewey's free verse poems have a startling originality, are very moving. When unhampered by the conventions of rhyme, Dewey can make more provocative leaps. He seemed unsure of free verse as a structure for his own poems, even as the modernists were adopting Ezra Pound's credo to "make it new," to free each modern poem from the confines of "poesy," i.e. fixed meters and rhyme. Dewey seemed to trust more the scaffold of rhyme to hold the poem up and did not stray too far in free-verse experiments, even if the poems were only for his eyes and judgment. We wish he'd taken stylistically his own advice in the poem "Education." (The "thy" in the poem most consistently refers to learning as an originality or freeness hampered by the school's demand that in order to learn "X" there are a whole stultifying range of prerequisites to master): I hardly think I heard you call Since betwixt us was the wall Of sounds within, buzzings i' the ear Roarings i' the vein so closely near, 5 That I was captured in illusion Of outward things said clear; And about was the confusion Of all the grown up persons said, More invasive than Goths and Huns, Education and Culture Fall. 2002 Vol. XIX No.2 22 RICHARD GIBBONEY & A. V. CHRISTIE 10 Urging to this and that Until my mind was but a seething vat...