Presented by His Grandfather with a Volume of Contemporary Literature

Ingenious Age once more essays to find

A proper gift for youth’s sophistick mind,

Well tho’ he know how bootless ‘tis to send

Aught that his own old head can comprehend.

Perplext, the Grandshire scours the stalls to chuse

Some spawn of Chaos and the bedlam Muse;

Some complex fruit of multiple dimensions,

With modern outlines and remote pretensions,

Which, scorning Euclid and the pedant race,

Revolts from Time, and flings a sneer at Space;

Of wit and beauty keeps discreetly chary,

And forfeits sense to be contemporary.

What best can suit so deep a disillusion,

And cater to such civilis’d confusion?

Whose pen indeed the wrought-steel crown deserves

As Cham of cubes, and Arbiter of curves?

For sure, ‘twere vain on normal art to lean

In youth’s jazz’d world of concrete and machine!

Gods of the Waste Land! say what monster new

Shou’d grace a shelf by Benda or Luleu?

What best befits a bookcase carv’d to ape

An airplane’s angles or a subway’s shape?

Subtle the style that fits our motor nation,

Smooth as a Ford, prim as a filling-station,

Mass’d and severe as yonder office tow’r,

Short in its wave-length, statick in its pow’r;

High as the crown of Mencken’s scornful hat,

Objective as a Times-Square Automat;

Devoid of pomp as Woolworth’s or McCrory’s,

And cerebral as Vogue or Snappy Stories;

Mature as moonshine booze, and free of bunk

As the frank perfume of the candid skunk;

Gay as a billboard, ardent as the graphick

And muddled as a stream of Broadway traffick;

Firm as a gangster or a stick-up man,

Ironick as an old tomato-can,

As radio loud, as movies democratick,

Symbolick as a Greenwich Village attick;

Bright as the tungsten of a Wrigley “ad”,

And settled as the latest sideburn fad—

Thus the deep lines that may alone express

Our whirling epoch in its rightful dress!

But who, mid our embarrassment of riches,

Wears the true laureate’s four-plus flannel breeches?

See in what throngs th’ ambitious candidate

Crashes and storms—and sometimes gets—the gate!

Here Joyce appears with Odysseys demure,

His prose a junk-pile, and his mind a sewer;

Hard on his heels the Hechtick hero hurtles,

With rose-tipt beak, and twin’d with Paphian myrtles.

Wise Eliot stalks in state—no friend of cant he—

And stores a cosmos in a triple “Shantih”;

Cursing all caps, the comely Cummings comes,

And Lindsay pounds his syncopated drums;

With fun and folklore struts romantick Cabell,

Chalking his half-hid smut behind the stable;

Stein formless foams, and chants the tender button,

Whilst Arlen’s wisecracks knowing saps may glut on.

Cubist and futurist combine to shew

Sublimer heights in Kreymborg and Cocteau;

The shade of Huysmans reddens prose and rhyme,

And fiction soars in Burke and Bodenheim.

Assist, ye brazen Nymphs of Montparnassus,

To chuse a chief from the bold hordes that gas us:

Say what pied knight of these assorted lots

Outshines with broken lines or rows or dots?

Tell aged Ignorance what seer to pick

As symbol of a world gone lunatick.

Count them all o’er, and find a name to lead

A dizzy universe of nameless speed.

How shall we do it? Simple as the day!—

Listen intent whilst modern criticks bray.

Weigh the wild clamour, and proclaim as proudest

The jumbled scribe whose name is heard the loudest.

Him we elect, and to the heights promote

As King Sophisticate by true straw vote.

His words alone we hold supremely fit

To feast a flaming youth of modern wit.

Hark! One—two—three!—the long-ear’d herd decide

On a vague ghost to be their aesthete-guide:

Hail to the chief their phrensy’d plaudits boost—

And take, Young Man, a tome by MARCEL PROUST!