Making It New: 1900–1945 445adopting an approach of classical restraint toward this subject, and attaching his
account of “the vacancies of need,” the emptiness of landscape he encounters in
the West to the traditional theme of lacrimae rerum. In spare and severe lines he
manages to suggest some of the contradictory feelings that issue from being “lost
in this place” called the open road of the American West, the luminosity and the exile,
and something too of the melancholy attendant on the mere condition of being alive.
The wit and sadness, and the preoccupation with mortality, that characterize so
many traditionalist writers are also typical of Eberhart, the author of more than
thirty volumes of poetry, among them A Bravery of Earth (1930), Selected Poems
1930–65 (1965), The Long Reach: New and Uncollected Poems, 1948–84 (1984),
Collected Poems 1930–1986 (1988), and New and Selected Poems (1990), and someone
who has been important both in his own right and as an influence on others. “We
are / Betrayed by time, which made us mortal,” Eberhart declares in “Anima”; and
nearly all his work starts from this recognition. The structure of the world is “hard”;
we all fall from “the pitch that is near madness,” the “violent, vivid” and “ immaculate”
state of childhood, “into a realm of complexity ... / Where nothing is possible but
necessity”; and only a willingness to see things “in a hard intellectual light” can restore
the “moral grandeur of man.” These beliefs feed into Eberhart’s writing, so that even
his simpler poems become striking for their intellectual dexterity and rigor: ideas or
experiences are introduced in a straightforward, even ingenuous, fashion and then
cunningly extended, in ways that often rely on allusion or verbal or metaphoric
tension for their impact. Eberhart’s aim is not only to see things clearly, however,
but also with “the supreme authority of the imagination” as his guide. Consequently,
an acknowledgment of what is never inhibits an awareness of what might be. “The
light beyond compare is the light I saw,” he says in one of his finest pieces, “The
Incomparable Light.” “I saw it in childhood ... / I glimpsed it in the turbulence of
growing up”; now, he adds, “It is this strange light I come back to, / Agent of truth,
protean, a radical of time.” Eberhart sees no contradiction between the “hard” light
of the intellect and the “strange” light of the imagination: on the contrary, the one is
for him the precondition of the other. He uses wit and dexterity, not as a substitute
for vision, but as a means of liberating it, of discovering what he calls “The truth of
the positive hour” which, for him, consists of “love / Concrete, specific,” “the grace to
imagine the unimaginable” that “Elevates man to an angelic state,” “the heart’s lonely
rapture,” and the “Inescapable brotherhood of the living.” “What shall I say to Walt
Whitman tonight?” asks Eberhart in his “Centennial for Whitman,” and admits he
has little time for Whitman’s “loose form,” “positive acclamation,” or “frenetic belief.”
But he does, he declares, meet with the founding father of American poetry in his
“Knowledge of the changeless in birth and death,” his glimmering sense of a process
whereby “Death is but a door” into other forms of living. He does, Eberhart concludes,
“speak to him in the universe of birth and death.” There could hardly be a more
measured, and so more honest, tribute from a traditionalist to one who was above
all an experimentalist. And it shows how, in the hands of some American writers at
least, traditionalism became a means, if not of transcendence, then of crossing the
boundaries of the familiar into new thresholds, new discoveries.GGray_c04.indd 445ray_c 04 .indd 445 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM