Part Eight Androgyne Verse
The first of the following attempts to penetrate into Plato’s “world of ideas” and get at the real essence of things, and then to express them in an ideal manner, was inspired by a chance visit to the Whitestone station in October, 1921. Subsequently I was seized with the desire to try out my muse in incorporating some of my other emotions and experiences in verse. I had essayed no metrical composition since 1905, the year of writing the last of my Fairie Songs, the best of which were published in the Autobiography of an Androgyne.
I understand by “poetry” the version of things seen incorporeally; things spiritualized or with a halo around them; things as they exist in substance, in reality, back of their superficial or phenomenal presentation—the version of things that an individual’s subconscious or subliminal self utters.
At present when I evolve verse, I try to lose myself to the phenomenal world—the domain of sensation—and to let down my bucket into the well of the subconscious, the subliminal; to peer into the eternal, the infinite world (the domain of fundamental substance). The sensuous, material skin or crust of this world of ideas is all that most children of Adam can grasp. Only to poets and metaphysicians has Nature given a rope of sufficient length that their buckets can reach as far as the water level in the well of ideas. Nearly all poets even of the first rank manage to flop into their buckets a few exquisite thoughts as to eternal realities, and clothed in appropriate language, only about once out of a score of attempts. Nineteen-twentieths of their verse would better have been forever withheld from the public’s eyes, since it is merely artificial, nonsense doggerel. In that proportion of their work, these poets of the first rank show themselves up merely as bad rhymesters.
The editor of The Female-Impersonators declared “the book would be better off without” my verse, but has kindly humored my wish to include it. The reader’s verdict may be that I, too, am merely a bad rhymester, and thus put my work on a level with the vast bulk of the outpourings and outdronings of our best poets.
But I, as a would-be poet, labor under the disadvantage of expressing sentiments of an androgyne. Even if there should |Androgyne Verse.| really be any poetry in my own outdronings, no one but another androgyne could recognize the fact, since it is next to impossible for anybody to appreciate any literature unless they can make its sentiments their own and identify themselves with one of the characters. And the sexually full-fledged, who constitute more than ninety-nine per cent of the reading public, are obsessed by an irrational horror of androgynes.
I therefore beg the reader, in judging the following verse, to bear in mind that it is not written by a man about men, as the reader first thinks; but about men by a pseudo-man; by a physical “man” who is psychicly a woman, and even physically a woman at least thirty-three per cent.
I have read some of Mary Baker Eddy’s verse, which her disciples place on a level with the Psalms of David. But I think the former weak and the latter perfect. Here again we see that to judge verse to be good, one has to imagine it one’s own outpouring. I therefore do not expect any sexually full-fledged person to declare of my verse (even if it were the best ever written) anything else than that it is “far beneath the worst doggerel. The mere thought of it is painful!”
For—I repeat—it is impossible for any one to judge poetry objectively—only subjectively: that is, not according to the merits of the verse, but according to whether the reader can make the sentiments his own.
A sexually full-fledged literary confidant, who has read the first two books of my trilogy, declared of my verse: “If you publish it, it will cast ridicule and contempt on your whole book. In the book, you have claimed culture, but when your readers come to this verse, they will say that no one with the culture of a longshoreman would try to pass off such stuff as verse even in fun, and that if you had the slightest tincture of literary taste, you would realize this. You will go down to posterity in ridicule, and destroy all the good your books might otherwise do.”
But I persist in including the verse. If the quoted verdict is correct, then I have “a screw loose” intellectually, as well as being sexually and anatomically “a freak of Nature.” The published pieces show the psychologist what ultra-androgyne verse is like. Besides, possible androgyne readers may be able to appreciate this verse.
As three out of the four following “attempts” were first conceived only in January, 1922—after The Female-Impersonators had gone to press—it has been impossible that they benefit by the author’s judgment after they have grown cold.