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":
A fourteen I married my Lord you.
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
At fourteen I married (my Lord!) you?
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:
Tube "E" or not tube "E" — that is the quest, chum.
Weather? 'Tis no blur in the mind . . .
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:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Upon the earth's sweet flowing breast.
Upon whose bosom snow has lain,
And intimately lives with rain.
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.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
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.