Sunday Pages: "On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness"

A poem by Arthur Guiterman

Mar 24, 2024

Dear Reader,

This week, a friend who is in his late 80s, and who was made, in his formative years at very good prep schools, to memorize a lot of poetry, shared with me, by rote, this short poem which had suddenly popped into his head—perhaps inspired by the batshit crazy events of the last month:

Providence, that watches over children, drunkards, and fools
With silent miracles and other esoterica,
Continue to suspend the ordinary rules
And take care of the United States of America.

I had never heard this before, but I figured it had to be the work of Ogden Nash—short, funny, pithy, vaguely concerned with current events. But no. Those four lines came from the pen of one Arthur Guiterman. I had never heard of Arthur Guiterman. In fact, I was not convinced Arthur Guiterman existed at all. Arthur Guiterman sounds like a character from a film by Chrisopher Guest or a novel by Roberto Bolaño.

Imagine my delight, then, to discover that not only was Arthur Guiterman a living, breathing poet—or, rather, a poet who once lived and breathed; he’s been dead since 1943—but one who wrote plenty of equally delightful verse. This gem, “What One Approves, Another Scorns,” is as perfect in execution as it is in concept:

What one approves,
another scorns,
and thus
his nature each discloses.
You find the rosebush
full of thorns,
I find the
thornbush full of roses.

In a full-page profile of Guiterman in the Sunday New York Times that ran the weekend of Thanksgiving, 1915, no less a poetical authority than Joyce Kilmer calls him “the Owen Seaman of America”—which I’m sure made perfect sense during the Great War, when Seaman was indeed “Punch’s famous editor,” and thus presumably a household name—and explains that “Arthur Guiterman is not a humorist who writes verse; he is a poet with an abundant gift of humor.”

Kilmer, of course, wrote a poem of great renown about trees, but is best known to us Garden State denizens for having a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop named for him, which was a bigger deal before they gave the same honor to Jon Bon Jovi. On the subject of the caprices of memory, I routinely forget key, necessary details of things, the names of people I should know by now, who I owe an email to, and so on, but I still know by heart the parody of “Trees” that ran in the august periodical that helped form my sense of humor—MAD Magazine—in maybe 1985 or so:

I think that I shall never hear
A poem as lovely as a beer.
The golden base, the foamy cap,
The stuff that Joe’s Bar has on tap.
Poems are made by fools, I fear,
But only Schlitz can make a beer.

When I was 12—which is to say, old enough to understand that the goobery Kilmer poem was ripe for mocking—I found this hysterical.

Some poetry and art and literature and music achieves immediate notoriety, and the stars of its creators never dim. Beethoven showed up in Vienna in 1791, the year Mozart died, and has been (rightfully) famous ever since. But there are many more examples of poets and artists and novelists and composers who were famous in their lifetimes, who made bank from their work, but who have since been consigned to history’s proverbial dustbin. Why do I know Ogden Nash but not Arthur Guiterman? What makes some stuff stick?

Lapham’s Quarterly did a series on “Forgotten Bestsellers” a few years ago which explores this idea:

Mary Ward, a British writer who published under her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward, was one of the most popular English-language novelists of the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1881 and 1920 she published twenty-six novels, many of them best sellers. But by the 1920s many of her novels, even those that had been remarkably popular, had fallen out of print. Today she is rarely read outside academic circles. Lady Rose’s Daughter, a society romance about illegitimacy, betrayal, and the role of women in society, captured the imaginations of many readers when it was first published. By reading it today, we can both enjoy a good story for its own sake and try to understand what compelled so many people to pay a hard-earned $1.50 for the chance to spend some time in the fictional world Ward created.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Mrs. Humphry Ward, let alone read any of her 26 books.

What did Guiterman think about all this, I wonder? Actually, I don’t have to wonder because he addresses the topic head-on in the Times profile. “Thinking of this poet’s financial success,” Kilmer writes, referring to Guiterman’s neat trick of earning a living writing light verse, “I asked him just what course he would advise a young poet to pursue who had no means of livelihood except writing.”

To his credit, Guiterman takes the question seriously. Despite the spectacles, he is refreshingly unpretentious. This is part of his answer:

He must study the needs and limitations of the various publications. He must recognize the fact that just because he has certain powers it does not follow that everything he writes will be desired by the editors. Marked ability and market ability are different propositions.
If he finds that the magazines are not printing sad sonnets, he must not write sad sonnets. He must adapt himself to the demands of the day.
There is high precedent for this course. You asked if I would give this advice to the young Keats. Why not, when Shakespeare himself followed the line of action of which I spoke? He began as a lyric poet, a writer of sonnets. He wrote plays because he saw that the demand was for plays, and because he wanted to make a living, and more than a living. But because he was Shakespeare his plays are what they are.
The poet must be influenced by the demand. There is inspiration in the demand. Besides the material reward, the poet who is influenced by the demand has the encouraging inspiring knowledge that he is writing something that people want to read.

For a writer seeking to make a living by writing, this remains sound advice. The marked ability / market ability line is genius, and I very much like the idea of there being inspiration in the demand. Is not one of the jobs of the poet, the playwright, and the novelist to make sense of the current moment? Arthur Miller wrote a popular play about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and McCarthyism—but he disguised it in Puritan garb, making “The Crucible” timeless.

And yet Guiterman was at least a little bit concerned with his legacy, or the idea of legacies. He explores this idea brilliantly in “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness”:

The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear, whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.

But Arthur Guiterman was not all about the laughs. Kilmer was right—he really is a poet with a gift for humor. I leave you today with this beautiful and by-the-book sonnet, “He Leads Us Still,” which—unlike some of his more disposable verse the humor of which depends on now-defunct pop cultural references—resonates just as powerfully today as it did when it was published a hundred some odd years ago:

Dare we despair? Through all the nights and days
Of lagging war he kept his courage true.
Shall Doubt befog our eyes? A darker haze
But proved the faith of him who ever knew
That Right must conquer. May we cherish hate
For our poor griefs, when never word nor deed
Of rancor, malice, spite, of low or great,
In his large soul one poison-drop could breed?
He leads us still. O’er chasms yet unspanned
Our pathway lies; the work is but begun;
But we shall do our part and leave our land
The mightier for noble battles won.
Here Truth must triumph, Honor must prevail;
The nation Lincoln died for cannot fail!