POET

Joyce Kilmer (1886 - 1918)

BIOGRAPHY

The immediate reception and the subsequent treatment of Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees" show to an extreme and disturbing degree the twentieth century's widening gulf between popular and academic tastes. While it is true that "Trees" first appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (August 1913), a magazine acclaimed for its early publication of many noteworthy modern poems (including Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), Kilmer's work has never gained the esteem of leading literary critics. Its immense and world-wide popularity has been with more ordinary, less exalted readers. Still recollected fondly seventy years after its publication, it appears in textbooks and anthologies—if it appears at all—only to be ridiculed. Fortunately, Kilmer was a more interesting and accomplished writer than "Trees" suggests.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer spoke of himself as half-Irish, perhaps seeing his natural exuberance and love of food and company as manifestations of the Celtic spirit, but his ancestry was predominantly English and German. His father, Frederick Barnett Kilmer, was a professional chemist, his mother, Annie Kilburn Kilmer, a minor writer and composer. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Joyce Kilmer attended Rutgers College (1904-1906) and Columbia University (A.B., 1908). Upon graduation in June 1908, he married Aline Murray, stepdaughter of Henry Mills Alden, the editor of Harper's Monthly, and earned his livelihood for a year as a Latin teacher at the Morristown, New Jersey, high school.

Attracted to New York City, he developed his skills as a magazine writer, particularly as a reviewer and editor. From 1909 to 1912 he was on the staff of the Standard Dictionary, involved in preparing new and revised definitions, a task which he did with gusto and proficiency. During the same period he was writing his early verse, much of which appeared in his first volume, Summer of Love (1911). In later years, he regretted the absence of the Catholic spirit in these poems and recognized their technical weaknesses. The sonnets, ballades, and lyrics have a sweet sensuousness, but often they will not bear analysis. In poems such as "Ballade of My Lady's Beauty" sound and fondness for the "poetic" phrase and reference dominate:

To Venus some folk tribute pay
And Queen of Beauty she is night,
And Sainte Marie the world doth sway
In cerule napery bedight.

The influence of William Butler Yeats and the Celtic Revival was obvious in many of the poems.

In 1912 he was literary editor for the Episcopal magazine Churchman, but the following year he obtained a more lucrative position with the Sunday magazine and book-review sections of the New York Times.

National recognition came in August 1913 with the publication of "Trees" in Poetry. The combination of sweet sentiment and simple philosophy expressed in apparently pellucid language (characteristic of many of his poems) made the poem memorable and widely quoted. After it was set to music by his mother and published in her Whimsical Whimsies (1927), it became dear to millions.

The opening lines—"I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree"—launched Kilmer on his metaphorical voyage, which continued with: "A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/Against the earth's sweet flowing breast ...." Kilmer doggedly kept to his metaphor, describing the tree's leafy, upraised arms, its robin-nested hair, and finally its snow-covered bosom. One need not be a rigid New Critic demanding cohesive analogy to be discomfited (or amused) by the anatomical absurdities of Kilmer's tree. The final lines are so unwittingly apt that one may fleetingly think the author is playing a joke: "Poems are made by fools like me,/But only God can make a tree."

With "Trees" Kilmer became a well-known poet and journalist. In a practiced, lively, and fluent style, he wrote reams of journalism. He managed the poetry sections of the Literary Digest and Current Literature, lectured on literature (there was something of the actor in his make-up), and wrote essays and prefaces on various authors.

In the fall of 1913, deeply moved by the infantile paralysis of his daughter Rose, he became a fervent convert from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism. Thereafter his writings—letters, essays, and poems—have frequent references to his new faith. He seemed, indeed, to desire an old form of Catholicism, as is shown in his 9 January 1914 letter to Father James Daly: "I need some stricter discipline, I think, and it's hard to get it. I enjoyed Father Cullen's direction very much, he is a fine Irishman with no nonsense about him . . . . And I wish I had some medieval confessor—the sort of person one reads about in anti-Catholic books—who would inflict real penance. The saying of Hail Marys and Our Fathers is no penance, it's a delight."

His fervent, often joyous Catholicism is apparent in many of his poems; and in his letters he worries—not always with full seriousness—about the offense a priest might receive from the language in some of his poems: "I've written to my long-suffering confessor to ask whether or not I can let characters in my plays and poems 'cuss,'" humorously calling it "vicarious profanity."

Trees and Other Poems (1914) demonstrates some advance in Kilmer's poetic skills, though the poems reflect the influence of earlier writers, such as the seventeenth-century poets George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw (another convert to Catholicism), as well as the more recent A.E. Housman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Coventry Patmore (also a convert). Indeed Kilmer's debt to these poets is so noticeable that his poetry has been labeled "a broken bundle of mirrors," a phrase that implies not only a multiplicity of influences but also a failure to develop his own style and personality. Some of the echoes were unconscious, but Kilmer deliberately patterned works on Patmore's.

Despite Kilmer's outward bonhomie, he was occasionally intolerant, even inhumane, in his poems. His reaction to the suicide of a young poet is vividly, but callously, conveyed in these lines from "To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself," put into the mouths of grave worms:

The fight was on—you ran away.
You are a coward and a craven.
The rug is ruined where you bled;
It was a dirty way to die!

He closes with: "Then don't you feel a little shame?/And don't you think you were an ass?" In "To Certain Poets" Kilmer expresses scorn for contemporary poets with "aesthetic" or too-delicate natures:

You little poets mincing there
With women's hearts and women's hair!
.........................................
Your tiny voices mock God's wrath
You snails that crawl along his path!
Why, what has God or man to do
With wet, amorphous things like you?

Kilmer's next book of poems was preceded by a collection of previously published essays, The Circus, and Other Essays (1916), and a series of interviews with literary personages, such as William Dean Howells, Amy Lowell, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Literature in the Making (1917). The verse in Main Street, and Other Poems (1917) is mellower and more varied. Readers sympathetic to his moral and religious preoccupations (such as Father Daly and the reviewer in Catholic World) praised his warmth and versatility, but there were others, such as Conrad Aiken, who still thought his verse facile and his ideas secondhand.

He wrote about contemporary events in "Easter Week" (in memory of Irish patriot Joseph Mary Plunkett, executed for his part in the Easter Week Rebellion of 1916) and in the few World War I poems. The interestingly varied lines of "The Cathedral of Rheims" probably owe much to Émile Verhaeren; and "The White Ships and the Red" was written in response to the sinking of the Lusitania, an event that made Kilmer--like so many of his countrymen--more sympathetic toward the cause of the Allies.

When the United States entered the war, Kilmer went to an officers' training camp, but he soon enlisted as a private in the 7th Regiment of the New York National Guard and later transferred to the 165th Regiment. (He began writing a historical account of his regiment in France, but it was unfinished when he was killed.) Unwilling to take time to undergo officer training, he was proud of his rise to the rank of sergeant. His letters show him to be an earnest and enthusiastic soldier, welcoming new experiences. There is sadness but also acceptance in the declamatory lines of "Rouge Bouquet":

There is on earth no worthier grave
To hold the bodies of the brave
Than this place of pain and pride
Where they nobly fought and nobly died.

His Catholicism and painful wartime experiences combined to produce some of his best verse in "Prayer of a Soldier in France," a poem through which the reader may painfully stagger with Kilmer and Christ along the via dolorosa of World War I:

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).
Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

Volunteering to take the place of a slain officer during an attack on the hills above the Ourcq, Kilmer went out to scout machine-gun nests. On 30 July 1918, he was found dead with an enemy bullet through his head. For his bravery he was buried beside officers, mentioned in dispatches, and posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was survived by his wife, Aline (who became a minor poet), and four children.

The memory of Kilmer's ebullient personality and his courage has dimmed as the decades have gone by, and much of his verse is forgotten and derided; but he merits some remembrance for his idealism and valor and for one or two significant poems.
— James A. Hart, University of British Columbia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Summer of Love (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1911).
Trees and Other Poems (New York: Doran, 1914; London: Duckworth, 1941).
The Circus, and Other Essays (New York: L.J. Gomme, 1916); enlarged as The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces, edited by Robert Cortes Holliday (New York: Doran, 1921).
Literature in the Making, by Some of Its Makers (New York & London: Harper, 1917).
The Courage of Enlightenment: An Address (Prairie du Chien, Wis., 1917).
Main Street, and Other Poems (New York: Doran, 1917).
Joyce Kilmer, two volumes, edited by Robert Cortes Holliday (New York: Doran, 1918).
Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets, edited by Kilmer (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1917).
Francis P. Duffy, Father Duffy's Story, includes Kilmer's unfinished history of the 165th Regiment (New York: Doran, 1919).

The Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress have collections of Kilmer's papers.