Seated one evening in the house of a friend, where a few had gathered to speak of Music, Art and Song, he exclaimed (after one present had read a poem exemplifying the feeling of poetry from the trammels of versification):
“Ah! Delancey Street needs that!”
Now, although we knew he lived down there, we did not at once see the connection. But his next remark was quietly eloquent of his whole attitude:
“I should like to walk nude with a girl through Delancey Street.”
And we who knew him immediately understood that he craved to feel the presence in all the world (of which Delancey Street was but a symbol) of a guilelessness which could see nakedness and be unashamed, of a simplicity of thought and action which should be pure, artless, and brotherly.
For such he is: and yet, as I have suggested, possessed of a mystic wisdom which quite disarms and sets as naught our dear-bought worldly Knowledge.
In this account there are a few inaccuracies — young Greenberg attended school for quite a bit more than the “few months” Fisher allots to him. Similarly, he worked in his brother Adolf’s leather bag shop a good deal longer than Fisher suggests — on and off from his tenth year through his eighteenth. But the young man’s general affect is certainly there in Fisher’s recollections.
Back in 1915, Greenberg, who had been making fair copies of his poems for some months now, approached Fisher about the possibility of publication. On April 22 of that year, Fisher wrote to Greenberg:
I am happy to hear that you propose to publish some of your poems, and I shall be glad to aid you in any manner possible. But first, as I have your best interests at heart, I feel I should warn you that a careful selection should be made, and that some of the poems will have to be slightly changed — a word or an expression.
Publication did not come, however, till after Greenberg’s death.
Here is the text of the fourth of the poems Fisher printed after his appreciation — “Serenade in Grey”—first as I transcribed it (line numbers are added) from Greenberg’s fair copy, now in the Fales Collection at New York University, followed by Fisher’s Plowshare version.
SBG 1914
Now, Fisher’s Plowshare version — with Fisher’s “slight” changes of “a word or an expression”:
(The McManis and Holden version of 1947 is somewhere in between my transcription and Fisher’s emendation, though it does not alter any of Greenberg’s actual words — only punctuation marks.) The sort of “fix-up” Fisher imposes (if not McManis and Holden) is out of favor today — though Emily Dickinson suffered similar “corrections” practically until the three-volume variorum edition of her complete poems in 1955. What is notable about Fisher’s emendations is that, while here and there a comma may, indeed, clarify Greenberg’s initial intentions, the general thrust of his changes is to take the highlight off the word as rhetorical object and to foreground, rather, coherent meaning.
All poetry — good and bad — tends to exist within the tensional field created by two historic propositions:
As Michael Riffaterre expresses the one, on the first page of his 1978 study The Semiotics of Poetry: “The language of poetry differs from common linguistic usage — this much the most unsophisticated reader senses instinctively… poetry often employs words excluded from common usage and has its own special grammar, even a grammar not valid beyond the narrow compass of a given poem…”
The opposing principle for poetry has seldom been better put than by Wordsworth, writing of his own project in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Pastoral, and Other Poems” in the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads: “… to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men…”
Now, in the very same sentence in which he upholds the difference between poetic and ordinary language, Riffaterre goes on to remind us that “… it may also happen that poetry uses the same words and the same grammar as everyday language.” And on the other side of a semicolon, in the same sentence in which he extols the “language really used by men,” Wordsworth reminds us that poetry tries, for its goal, “at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way…” Presumably this secondary task is accomplished by unusual language.
The question then is not which is right and which is wrong, but which is primary and which is secondary — and how primary and how secondary. At various times over the last two hundred years the perceived relation between them has changed. The ministrations of a Fisher (in the case of Greenberg) during the late teens of the century currently ending, or of a Higginson (an early editor of Dickinson) during the ’90s of the previous century, merely document where the tensions between them had stabilized at a given moment.
The archaic forms, the inversions, as well as the specialized vocabulary were, in the first third of the twentieth century, simply part of poetry’s specialized language. And although they would be almost wholly abandoned by poets during the twentieth century’s second half, even a high modernist such as Pound was using them as late as The Pizan Cantos (1948): “What though lov’st well remains.” “Pull down thy vanity!”—though, after that, even in the Cantos, they pretty much vanish.