Collected Poems (2 page)

“That is how I wrote and why I wrote.”

For the last twelve years of his life it was my privilege to know this excellent man. He was physically frail but not weak; he was gentle but not soft. He loved gracious living, beauty, Greece, the song of bird, the smell of rose and the peaceful solitude of his oak-paneled
study. Yet he never side-stepped, intellectually or physically, to avoid a fight.

Even before his too-soon death last year, legends began to spread throughout the Mississippi Delta about this small slender man with the shock of gray hair and gray-blue eyes that could warm the spirit of friend or chill the heart of foe. Medals and citations from the Allied governments attest his personal heroism in war. The legends tell of a deadlier kind of bravery from this gentle peaceloving man: Will once sat in the front row at a hostile Ku Klux Klan political meeting where the speaker was scheduled to attack a friend. “The speaker didn’t make the attack,” the story ends, “so Mr. Will didn’t kill him.” Countless are the tales of how he bearded local officials, single-handed, and forced them to deal justly with Negroes — neither a trivial nor a popular thing to do in some sections of the State of Mississippi.

Yet this man who walked among the dead and dying in Flanders, and who quenched the fires of fanatical oratory by his mere presence, wrote after a brief visit to New York:

He was not alien to his homeland, in spite of seeming always to hold apart from run-of-the-creek Delta cotton and small town lawyer. He had a genuine love of people and the happy genius of attracting loyal friends to himself. Even Mississippi’s poor whites, that embittered, underfed, hook-worm-ridden race that thrives on hate and prejudice, regarded him with something between esteem and tolerance, “For a rich man’s son, Mr. Will is a right clever man.”

Reciprocally, Mr. Will did what he could to understand and to help these people. They represented things he most abhorred — hate, prejudice, disease, shiftlessness, and he strove mightily to bring about an improvement of these people without once deviating from his own high principles.

It is not my purpose to estimate the place in letters Will’s poetry occupies. Critics have done that, variously. The only generalities I can apply to it all is that it is beautiful, charming and a delight to read. As the poet’s character was complex and seemingly at variance with itself, at times, yet always a pleasure to his friends, always warm with a love for truth and beauty, so is his poetry always warm and honest and lyrical. As he himself was, so is his poetry ever sensitive to though never hysterical about life and death. Often Will withdrew himself from life, not to an ivory tower where the living and the dying world could not touch him, but rather to an Olympus of his own where he could observe with truer perspective and sharper clarity the realities below. What he saw from his Olympus he set down in song.

In “St. Francis to the Birds” we hear the good saint chiding both himself and his winged congregation, though not too seriously:

The spirit of the poem is a kind of sly connivance between a not too holy saint and not too evil sinners.

But there is neither tolerance nor gentleness in “An Epistle from Corinth” wherein a Corinthian replies to the letters of St. Paul. Here there are bitter denunciation and blame for the Apostle’s failure to comprehend that which he sought to teach:

Throughout the entire length of “Sappho in Levkas” there is a high lyrical nervous tension — a woman’s confession of carnal sin — a sin which she has once enjoyed and which she enjoys again in the telling. It is a complete and detailed confession, but there is no repentance:

If one must have a label for Will’s poetry, “lyrical in the classic tradition” would serve as well as another, perhaps. Still, not only did the imagined memories of the Golden Age of Greece, or the simple miracles of medieval times strike chords on his lyre; he also sings of the Mississippi River and the rich soil of the Delta and of the people who live upon it. In a sonnet to the River he captures its spirit:

On the death of a well-loved dog gone mad, he inspires not pity, not regret but the solacing hope of a friend in Eternity:

Beginning in 1911, Will wrote poetry for twenty-five years. During this time he met and talked with world citizens. Athens, Paris, Italy, the South Seas were hosts to him. In between he managed to fight a war with his small furious body and burning mind. He was scared, he hated war — “It is the wickedest, most hateful thing man was ever guilty of” — yet he had to work like hell even to get in the Army: in the end he had to depend on the usual bananas and water to get by on weight. And when he came home he was a Captain, wearing a Croix de Guerre with a gold and a silver star. Feeling dead inside and incapable of emotion he was, nevertheless, able to write:

During the twenty-five years of his creative work, he met with and talked to poets here and abroad. This was, it will be recalled, the era of revolt, the hoop-la era. Poets turned peddlers and proved more ingenious in advertising their wares than in perfecting their art. Groups and cults gathered in great numbers to quaff at the algae of public esteem like so many schools of minnows. Will Percy shunned all of these movements. He did not cry out in verse or before lecture audiences for an understanding of his genius. He made no struggle to liberate poetry from the older forms. Of his technique Will wrote:

“I tried to make it sound as beautiful and as fitting as I could. Old patterns helped, but if rhyme seemed out of place, the choruses of
Samson Agonistes
, some of Matthew Arnold’s unrhymed cadences, and Shakespeare’s, later run-on pentameters suggested freer and less accepted modes of communication. As far as I can make out, the towering bulk of English poetry influenced me tremendously, but not any one poet, though I hope I learned as much as I think I owe to Browning’s monologues and to Gilbert Murray’s translations of Euripides.”

He wrote a good deal and I find no evidence of any struggle either to conform or not to conform. He wrote gracefully, with ease, with beauty, with honesty and dignity. This seems to me important because it seems typical of the man as well as the poet.

Whether he was in Greece on the shores of the Aegean, or in Greenville on the banks of the Mississippi, Will Percy plucked his own lyre and sang his own songs to the stars and to the wind and to the dawn.

R
OARK
B
RADFORD