Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue

No man who writes for money fails to owe a debt of gratitude to the editors who sign the checks; and I am grateful to the gentlemen who considered my opinions worth the trouble, even at a discount. Many of these editors made my debts the greater by pointing out my errors and infelicities, which more often than not I labored to correct. I’m grateful to the editors of the New Criterion, New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Southwest Review, TLS, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Wall Street Journal, as well as to Garrick Davis, the editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, who conducted a placable interview with me.

I have placed two reviews of Thomas Pynchon in a volume otherwise about poetry because there is something, as there was for Melville, intrinsically poetic about the way he writes. They are also here for comic relief.

It was my intention to reproduce, in the essay “Frost at Midnight,” eight passages from Frost’s notebooks in photofacsimile, so that the reader might judge for himself the flaws in the editor’s transcriptions. The Frost estate, unfortunately, refused permission.

“Those mountains certainly do, my lord,” rejoined the Countess, pointing to the Pyrenees; “and this chateau, though not a work of rude nature, is, to my taste, at least, one of savage art.” The Count colored highly. “This place, madam, was the work of my ancestors,” said he.

Yet, notwithstanding all the attention which these people bestow upon this savage art, for which they have public schools, they are outdone by savages. When one of the English squadrons of discovery was at Tongataboo, several of the natives boxed with the sailors for love, as the phrase is, and in every instance the savage was victorious.

The cavalcade had not long passed, before the branches of the bushes that formed the thicket were cautiously moved asunder, and a human visage, as fiercely wild as savage art and unbridled passions could make it, peered out on the retiring footsteps of the travellers.

The more a man studies savage art, the more is he struck by the almost universal good taste which it displays. Every chair, stool, or bench is prettily shaped and neatly carved. Every club, paddle, or staff is covered with intricate tracery which puts to shame our European handicraft.

A remarkable peculiarity of their pipe-carvings is that accurate representations are given of different natural objects, instead of the rude caricatures and monstrosities in which savage art usually delights. Nearly every beast, bird, and reptile indigenous to the country is truthfully represented, together with some creatures now only found in tropical climates, such as the lamantin and toucan.

This is just what I was told by a carpet manufacturer who was perfectly aware of the ugliness of his wares, who laughed at it, and regretted that it was a necessity. He illustrated it by showing me the kinds of carpets and rugs which “sold like hot cakes.” It was pitiful, for no Red Indian and no savage negro would ever have designed aught so repulsive. Savage art is never half so savage as that produced by the most enlightened nation on the face of the earth, and English carpets are little better.

I also got from another fellow a very pretty model of a New Guinea canoe. … It cost me no less than three sticks of trade tobacco to become the possessor of this masterpiece of savage art, for its owner evidently valued it highly, though of what use it could have been to him I cannot conceive.

[The aboriginal’s] place in art—as to drawing, not color-work—is well up, all things considered. His art is not to be classified with savage art at all, but on a plane two degrees above it and one degree above the lowest plane of civilized art. To be exact, his place in art is between Botticelli and De Maurier. That is to say, he could not draw as well as De Maurier but better than Bot[t]icelli.

Some men were even relapsing from the point that art had reached on the earlier stage of “rim ram ruf”—on the rhythmical prose of alliteration either simple of itself or awkwardly bedizened, like a true savage art, with feathers and gawds of inappropriate stanza and rhyme.