Birthday: Joyce Kilmer, friend of the forest

Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)
Poet, critic, essayist

When a two-volume memorial edition of Joyce Kilmer’s works was published in 1919, The North American Review appraised the fruits of his meteoric career (his poetry was “as friendly as a handshake”). The uncredited reviewer concluded, “[T]here is no single essay or poem, perhaps, that would preserve the name of Joyce Kilmer from oblivion.”

Kilmer, it seemed, was a poet born to be forgotten. His verse was accessible, undemanding, and, undoubtedly, pious: after his infant daughter contracted polio, Kilmer and his wife converted to Catholicism. It was not a stretch to move from his interest in the 16th and 17th-century English mystics to the Swinburne/Hopkins style of Anglo-Catholic high church verse. In an age when America longed for her artists and writers to equal the great of Europe, his essays and reviews won him comparisons to Chesterton and Belloc.

But as that early reviewer noted, it was not great poetry. It was well-crafted, mostly, and nestled comfortably in the great middle of good American verse.

Fate, as P.G Wodehouse put it, lurked around the corner, slipping the lead into the glove, and on February 2, 1913, Kilmer’s doom was sealed for all time. His son remembered,

It was written in the afternoon in the intervals of some other writing. The desk was in an upstairs room, by a window looking down a wooded hill. It was written in a little notebook in which his father and mother wrote out copies of several of their poems, and, in most cases, added the date of composition. On one page the first two lines of 'Trees' appear, with the date, February 2, 1913, and on another page, further on in the book, is the full text of the poem. It was dedicated to his wife's mother, Mrs. Henry Mills Alden, who was endeared to all her family.

“Trees” was published in the fledgling Poetry Magazine in August, and was an immediate hit. It titled Kilmer’s next published collection, in 1914: “Trees, and other poems.”

Eighty words, twelve lines long:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Kilmer was born in New Jersey. His father was on the staff of the Johnson & Johnson Company, and inventor of its famous Baby Powder. Kilmer went to Columbia University, where he was vice president of the Philolexian Society, a literary club.

After graduation he taught high school Latin for a year, and wrote poetry. His essays and books reviews won space, then work, in The Literary Digest, Town & Country, The New York Times Book Review and The Nation. In 1909, he returned to New York to be a man of letters.

Kilmer got a job at Funk & Wagnalls, defining words for its 1912 Standard Dictionary. The pay was five cents a word; the average wordsmith earned $10-$12 a week. Kilmer cranked out definitions so fast F&G put him on the payroll to save money. The facility with words served him well as a lecturer: he rarely prepared in advance, but once he got started, he rarely lacked for a next word.

Kilmer published his first book of poems in 1911 and moved to The New York Times in 1912. He married his college sweetheart and they had five children. He cranked out articles and poetry at a dizzying pace, publishing two books each in 1916 and 1917.

When America entered the Great War, Kilmer enlisted, rising quickly to a sergeant's rank. He declined an officer’s epaulets, preferring to be in the trenches where the action was. In early 1918 he transferred to an intelligence unit, seeking new dangers. During the second battle of the Marne in July, he volunteered to lead his unit into battle alongside Major William B. Donovan, who survived the war to found the Office of Strategic Services- the forerunner to the CIA- in the war after the War to End All Wars.

Kilmer was buried in a military cemetery in France and posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre. His fame, the romance of his death, and the post-war vogue for doomed soldier-poets elevated him to a status worthy of fifteen parks and monuments, and eight middle and elementary schools bearing his name across the land. Colleges and towns associated with Kilmer vied to ennoble “the” tree of “Trees”, though his family insisted it was not about just one. Of the three Kilmer kids who survived to adulthood, one became a nun; the other two bravely bore the family curse until their deaths in 1984 and 1995.

For decades, garden clubs recited “Trees” in Arbor Day celebrations. It went into every anthology in print. Short and sing-songy, it could be learned and recited by the youngest school child. Kilmer left the publishing rights to Poetry Magazine, which survived for years on the income. Kilmer’s mother was the first to set the verse to music.

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren- advocates of the New Criticism, which challenged poetry that acted as a surrogate for religion- took four pages to chop it down in their college textbook, Understanding Poetry. They called its imagery pantheistic, more descriptive of a seriously deformed human than a thing arboreal, and concluded, “The fact that it has been popular does not necessarily condemn it as a bad poem. But it is a bad poem.”

“Trees” has its defenders. It has a wholesome simplicity and a coming modesty in its ending. Both qualities ring true in an age of irony and narcissism. The critic Guy Davenport called it the only poem pretty much everyone alive knows, which he thought a good thing for poetry as an art form. Kilmer’s problem was that he was one of the last celebrity poets of Anglo-American Romanticism. Modernism was on the march, and the like of Eliot and Pound had no truck with the versifiers of a bygone age.

It also lent itself to parody; Ogden Nash did a number on it, and was not alone in the sport. Columbia students revived the Philolexian Society in 1985 for the sole purpose of sponsoring an annual Joyce Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest.

Alfalfa screeched out the 1922 Oscar Rasbach musical setting in an Our Gang short film. One of pianist Victor Borge’s bits of business was- when taking requests- to respond, "Sorry I don't know that 'Doggie in the Window'. I know one that comes pretty close to it," and proceeding to play the Rasbach setting of "Trees."

Thomas Merton used the poem to mock his monastery’s entry into a highly lucrative business enterprise:

Chee$e
I think that we should never freeze
Such lively assets as our cheese
The sucker’s hungry mouth is pressed
Against the cheese's caraway breast.
...
Poems are nought but warmed-up breeze.
DOLLARS are made by Trappist Cheese.

In the film Superman II, the villain Lex Luthor, sampling the crystals into which the Man of Steel's father recited the wisdom of the universe, comes across Jor-El’s recitation of “a typical ode, much loved by the people you will live among":

Luthor: Good God!
Eve: Hey, wait! I love “Trees.”
Luthor: So does the average cocker spaniel.

Whatever he had in mind that February Day in 1913, Kilmer was no nature boy. A 1915 magazine article reported:

[W]hile Kilmer might be widely known for his affection for trees, his affection was certainly not sentimental- the most distinguished feature of Kilmer’s property was a colossal woodpile outside his home. The house stood in the middle of a forest and what lawn it possessed was obtained only after Kilmer had spent months of weekend toil in chopping down trees, pulling up stumps, and splitting logs. Kilmer’s neighbors had difficulty in believing that a man who could do that could also be a poet.

#HenryBemisBooks #LiteraryBirthdays #JoyceKilmer
www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com