American Moderns Reissued

Dover Books of Mineola, New York, has never made an appearance in the prestige pages of ABR. Dover publishes clean inexpensive editions of world classics, along with every Shakespeare play in a separate blue paperback, CDs with fair-use images for designers, and stand-up pictures of US presidents and their wives along with stick-on paper clothes. The occasion for this note: by new publications, they’ve been showing that early volumes of American moderns have emerged from the original copyright.

You can now purchase these seven books from Dover for $26 and receive the news that stays news: Robert Frost, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston (together in one book, both 1915), The Road Not Taken (1916) and New Hampshire (1923); William Carlos Williams, Early Poems (3 volumes from 1916–1921) and Spring and All (1923); E. E. Cummings, Tulips & Chimneys (1923); Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).

Frost, born in 1875, was the last American poet who came on the scene before the thematic-formal upheaval of modernism, so he’s different from the other three even though his full career ran parallel with theirs. Frost and Stevens show the influence of William Wordsworth in their blank verse meditative works, and Frost remembers Browning in his ability to write monologues and dialogues with voices other than his own. Williams and Cummings have plainly been to school with Walt Whitman, in the overthrow or displacement of rhyme and the dismemberment of the old metered line — also in frankness of self-reference.

What these thin blue volumes offer, first, is that they are made by the author as books. They are also held in the reader’s mind as books. So the well-known anthology pieces co-exist with the other poems written at the same time. As a reader, you can see the writer’s determination to shape your reception of works written over a year or two. All four writers create a careful, culminating sequence: for instance, Frost begins New Hampshire with the thirteen-page, talky monologue with the state’s name as title and ends with what he knew was the most memorable lyric in the set, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.”

What these books also offer, unexpectedly, is the picture of a young man in his thirties (yes, they’re all men) as a husband and father, something readers might have forgotten in the dazzling glare of the authors’s later fame. (That is, for Frost, Williams, and Stevens; with Cummings in Tulips & Chimneys, you get direct explicit accounts of visits to whores, and who has done that better?) In Frost, Williams, and Cummings (though not Stevens), you’ll also find lots of quoted, overheard speech from their contemporaries in the early twenties. (Williams: “Our orchestra / is the cat’s nuts”; Cummings: “raise the shade / will youse dearie?”).

Most valuable: these books, as books, are evidence of four writers performing a self-taught skill of working with shaped words. Week in, week out over a long stretch, that becomes the work of evoking a talent in the construction of a career. As the occasions multiply and the pages pile up, the writer develops an original relation to time, space, perception, language, society, America. Speaking for these four, when poets are ready to issue a book, they know which are the major and which...