The Poetry of Thomas Ferril
VIERECK, PETER
WRITERS and WRITING The Poetry of Thomas Ferril By Peter Viereck Peter Viereck is a Pulitzer Prize poet. He is author of Terror and Decorum. Strike Through the Mask. The First Morning and other...
...They do not include titles like "American Testament" (with his bad, predictable beginning: "Where were their myths...
...won the award of the Yale Series of Younger Poets...
...That is why I dislike many of Ferril's poems...
...Something to chokecherry your throat's addressed...
...Let there he ritual, Sir, if you return...
...Let us not overstate our case...
...Or this uncanny fragment, worthy of Hart Crane, from "Canter the Horses, Please": "I wont dismount, explain...
...Even his finest work seems uneven...
...While the Little Magazines and the New Critics ignore Ferril, the middlebrow magazines and critics insult him with enthusiastic philistine praise as some kind of homespun Colorado frontiersman...
...Such are the titles of his best poems...
...Their christening this sensitive artist of delicate nuances the "poet laureate of the Rocky Mountains" (a slogan proudly blurbed by one of his publishers, presumably to pigeonhole him forever) proves that American poets have less to fear from hostile book reviews than from favorable ones...
...To this dark valley, warring years behind, Something you started to say, don't understand, And love and half recall and hope to find...
...In one of his longest and tenderest poems, "Magenta," the author converses with a dressmaker's dummy (named "Magenta") found near a deserted coal mine: "The dressmaker's dummy was meant to be like a woman: There was no head...
...Living in the heights of his native Denver, Ferril is the Colorado poet whose literary stature is the subject of a little-known epigram by none other than Frost himself: "A man is as tall as his height Plus the height of his home town...
...Westering (1934...
...If an impersonal indignation against injustice, a duty to remedy wrongs, has any urgency left in literary criticism, then it is high time for the serious weeklies and quarterlies (and not merely popular magazines) to study adequately and at length the word-music of Ferril...
...You're someone else Walking the same draw now, left shoulder west...
...The First Morning and other hooks...
...Through changing fashions, Ferril has remained true to himself...
...But among those I do like there is one very special emotion that Ferril conveys more movingly, more heart-breakingly than any other poet in American literature: the emotion of wistfulness...
...If a thousand geniuses of the art of poison-pen united to invent the perfect kiss of death for a good poet, they could think of nothing grimmer than "poet laureate of the Rocky Mountains...
...I wasn't what they wanted, yet I was": Note that almost every word of this line and of the rest of the quatrain is a monosyllable: here is maximum difficulty (the legitimate difficulty of several layers of meaning) combined with maximum simplicity...
...Or this magical couplet from "Wood": "And seven wondrous stags that I Could not believe walked slowly by...
...But the very best poems of Ferril include wonderfully vivid lines like these from "Life After Death": "I can distinguish with a clear precision The summer bones of winter-frozen steers From ribs of unicorns and jaws of centaurs...
...Here we have the really real thing, namely that combination of true simplicity with true difficulty which is the only way out of the present false choice between Scylla and Charybdis: between the Alexandrian-epigone hacks, with their pseudo-difficulty of sloppy random associations, and the lowbrow hacks, with their pseudo-simplicity of moronic greeting-card verse...
...Is the world beautiful...
...His two verse books of this decade are Trial by Time (1944) and New and Selected Poems (1952...
...And I told a mountain at some distance to Become her lilac hair and face and neck...
...In 1926...
...And I can tell you as a certain thing, Still while events within our muscles let Us swing an arm an arc of the horizon, That you will love me more for having told you To see what I have seen in natural men, In elms, in falcons, or in coats of horses...
...Ferril's High Passage...
...His real virtue, his enchantingly beautiful sense of wonder, is closer to the best French surrealists than to the star-spangled, 200-per-cent-American pseudo-folklore of his regionalist culture-hounds and adoring clubwomen...
...Ferril has scorned the cheap popularity that could have been his hat...
...All are out of print: except the last-named book, which also includes his new work of the decade...
...Mornings were never real, but usually By noon the women died and the men came up From the bottom of the earth to bury them.' After a dozen re-readings...
...Yale University Press also published his second book of verse...
...In reality, his "0 pioneers" scenic props, his supposed virtue, are the most embarrassing, the most papier-mache aspect of his art...
...And I will love you more than beast or rock Can love you, or the dead can ever love you, If, with no special memory of this hour, You say some day, because you have to say it: 'Remember how it was when we turned our horses Out of the dark arroyo into the sunlight?'" * "I have fallen in love with American names?Bury my heart at Wounded Knee...
...Let us not only "praise famous men," but let us learn to praise them for the right reasons...
...or "Let Your Mind Wander Over America...
...The response to the poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril recalls in one respect the response which the great Robert Frost sometimes used to evoke: namely, getting praised for the wrong reasons by middlebrow hacks and neglected for the wrong reasons by avant-garde hacks...
...Morning Star" ("There was a range of mountains once I loved until I could not breathe"), "Magenta," "Wood," "Canter the Horses," "The Prairie Melts," "Life After Death" and "Stem of Wheat...
...smaller poets like Stephen Vincent Benet* have permanently banalized it...
...Surely the time has come for a moratorium in American verse on place-names like Sleepy Creek, for someone to write an essay rebelliously called: "Who Cares About Wounded Knee...
...the aim, like all myth-seeking, is laudable and necessary, but their solution is synthetic, facile, unearned...
...The lantern light...
...I suspect that this last quatrain is the way—the style, the swing—in which the great elemental poetry of the future will get written, if it gets written at all...
...His major defect is that combination of semi-free verse (half slave and half free) and a free-wheeling "myth-making" which results from his ostentatiously red-blooded and fol-low-the-gleam moments...
...I know a Denverite Who, measured from sea to crown, Is one mile five-foot-ten, And he swings a commensurate pen...
...he compromised with the mechanized neo-conformism to which modernism and the avant-garde have degenerated...
...Examples are: "Jim Bridger" (with its refrain of "What can you say to an old man in the evening...
...Nor do these genuinely wistful poems include those that exploit quaint American place-names that are just too "evocative" for words...
...The breasts and belly were A cool enamel simulating life...
...But more important than mere literal height is the metaphoric altitude of Ferril's integrity as an artist...
...Magenta said...
...This exploitation comes off when handled by Whitman...
...I wasn't what they wanted, yet I was...
...In just two lines, his only war poem sums up all the pathos of "a young man flying the Pacific": "Oceans that you crayoned blue Have come desperately true...
...It is the occupational disease of all Far Western poets, making myths right and left, that they will unveil the true secret of the American Dream at the drop of a silver dollar...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 34
