University of Virginia Library

Genuine revolutions in literary taste and theory occur on an average only once every seven generations; therefore it is a source of satisfaction to have myself piloted what may be the most shattering reappraisal in our literature. I am referring — as the world of letters now knows well — to the discovery (made about the time that flying saucers began to be widely observed here and abroad) of that core of inner is-ness in the poetry of the long misread, long underrated Joburt Eggson Skilmer, or Joe E. Skilmer as he himself signed his poems. Slighted by serious readers for what seemed the facility of his technique and the pious banality of his thought — especially as shown in the poem known as "Trees" — Skilmer was in reality the perpetrator of an existentialist hoax on a public that prided itself on knowing what was genuine.

For years, many of us had been dissatisfied with the reading generally accorded this remarkable poem — the kind of official reading that provoked academic guffaws in a thousand classrooms. "There is more here than meets thee, eye," I would murmur to myself, teased by a host of ambiguities, of velleities that never quite came clear. It was a question of tone. Perhaps my first breakthrough came when I heard Professor Wrugson O. Muttson reading a line from Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter":

Muttson read the line as if it expressed wifely devotion. But it was obvious to me, as to any especially sensitive reader, that Pound intended the line to be heavily ironic, and that the "tone" might better be represented by something like My trouble had been that I was ventriloquizing, putting my own voice into the poem, instead of letting it read itself to me. Do not read poems — this became my principle — be read to by them. This approach led to a number of discoveries, of which possibly the most earth-shaking was my article proving that Hamlet's famous soliloquy is not about suicide at all but about his meteorological and alchemical experiments with a numbers of test tubes (the "retorts" he is famous for), of which the tube lettered "E" seemed the most promising if the most vexatious: But this reading, now officially adopted in the best textual editions, is too well known to need further quotation. I have also found my method of "deep reading" fruitful in the perusal of several thousand lines of Paradise Lost, and I suspect that our whole literature will have to be reread in the light of it. However: it was on the basis of this strict principle that I returned to Skilmer's great love poem to Therese Murk of Peoria. Called simply "Therese", or "T'rese", it had too long been thought of as having something to do with "trees" ! The misconception arose from Skilmer's supreme irony; he had all too successfully "achieved an overlay", as he liked to say when speaking of the technique of poetry. That is, by a triumph of art he had given a shallow surface glaze, a pretty spindrift, to the profound abysses of the poem — a glaze so trompe-l'oeil that many were never able to see beneath it. What the public had been doing was reading only the "overlay" instead of what he called the "substruct", and what they settled for was something miserably like this: Sheer banality! (And how far short of Skilmer's own noble definition of a poem as "a shimmering spitball flung into the great catcher's-mitt of eternity.") But the poem's innerness, which my researches have arrived at, is another thing entirely. What I mean to do here is demonstrate the "substruct", unit by unit, explicating where I can, though it is doubtful that any reader, or group of readers, will ever arrive at an adequate notion of the riches hidden in this most wonderful of poems.