'To Make Something Beautiful'

“There have been many things I’ve tried to write about and could not. Things too serious, too painful, and that’s not the purpose of writing a poem. The point of poetry is to make something beautiful—something in itself. I’m not trying to pour my sorrows down on the page.” 

Janet Lewis was being interviewed late in life, at age ninety-nine, the year before her death. The interviewer seems surprised, and asks, “So, it is not cathartic for the writer?” Lewis replies: “Not for me. That’s exactly what I don’t write.” The notion that writing is not therapeutic, not a tool for lancing pain and self-pity like a boil, is so alien to contemporary readers and writers that it requires translation as though it were in a foreign language. Not that Lewis’ poems are cold. One is always aware that her poems were composed by a single, specific twentieth-century woman. In that sense most  of her poems are domestic, even occasional. They are artful without being artsy-fartsy.

In her fiction and verse, Lewis is one of the few essential American writers of the last century, along with Willa Cather, William Maxwell, Ralph Ellison, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nabokov, her husband Yvor Winters and a few others. One of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), is among the four or five finest produced by an American.  Here is a 1945 poem, “Lines with a Gift of Herbs”:  

 

“The summer's residue

In aromatic leaf,

Shrunken and dry, yet true

In fragrance, their belief,

 

“These from the hard earth drew

Essence of rosemary,

Of lavender, faintly blue,

While unconfused nearby

 

“From the same earth distilled

Grey sage and savory,

Each one distinctly willed,

Stoic morality.

 

“The Emperor said: ‘Though all

Conspire to break thy will,

Clear stone, thou emerald, shall

Be ever emerald still.’

 

“And these, small, unobserved,

Through summer chemistry,

Have all their might conserved

In treasure, finally.

 

“The Emperor” is Marcus Aurelius in Meditations (trans. Maxwell Staniforth): “Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to keep myself good; just as a gold piece, or an emerald, or a purple robe insists perpetually, ‘Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to remain an emerald and keep my color true.’” The passage suggests Lewis’ courage and steadfastness, her “Stoic morality. Here is a poem she wrote after the death of a friend and fellow novelist, “For Elizabeth Madox Roberts." The dedication reads “Who died March 13, 1941”:

 

“From the confusion of estranging years,

The imperfections of the changing heart,

This hour leaves only tears;

Tears, and my earliest love, Elizabeth, and changeless art.”

 

Lewis was born in Chicago on August 17, 1899, and died on this date in Los Altos, Calif., on December 1, in 1998.

 

[See The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (ed. R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000).]