After all the storm and breadth of remarking on my several-year presentations of “The Waste Land,”  the totality of which takes more than an hour to listen to, it’s time to return to a smaller Modernism. To start that off, let me present a tiny poem by Emily Dickinson.

Wait, you said Modernism. Dickinson? Well, some early Modernists recognized that Mid-19th century American poet as a Modernist who forgot to check the calendar.*  And as I remind readers here often, early Modernism was very enamored of short, seemingly unpretentious poems, and today’s piece “How Many Flowers”  has those elements:

How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are beautiful —

How many cast a nameless Pod
Upon the nearest Breeze —
Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight —
It bears to Other Eyes —

Indeed, with some editing/translation it could be a full-fledged, circa-1916 Imagist poem. Dickinson’s poem speaks of plural flowers, and that’s in tune with the point it’s making, but an Imagist might have simply changed it to a singular flower, or at least an instant of several flowers. The negative-pathetic fallacy of the flower’s ignorance of its beauty might have been excised. So, if William Carlos Williams or H.D. had written it in the 20^th century it might have arisen like this:

The flowers fail in the wood
And perish from the hill.
Is there a privilege to know
That they are beautiful?

There is a breeze, and in it
Some nameless pods —
Seeds of scarlet freight
Bearing from eyes to eyes.

More or less the same thought and brevity, just a removal of the remaining 19^th century Romanticism that Dickinson retained even as she would question it, and of course the word-music changes some. Today I chose to keep Emily Dickinson’s word music and original expression intact. But either poem is making a declaration about art: that it’s often created because it must be, out of an urge that is as omnipresent and mysterious as flowers, and that like flowers it’s part of a reproductive system that allows many seeds for few flowers and even fewer idle reflective eyes to see the flowers, this passing fecundity and unnecessary beauty.

All flowers, like all artists, fail, but “Unconscious of the scarlet freight…”

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I present this piece today as I read two memoirs by little-remembered early-20^th century Modernists — and from those little-noticed flowers I noticed some others, eyes carried in the wind to my eyes that I hope to present here soon for yours. But for today, we have my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “How Many Flowers.”  with a player that will land and bloom for some of you, and this alternative for those who don’t see the player, a highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab to let you play my performance.

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*In our 21^st century — with grace of a scholarly culture once blind but now can see — the depth and subtlety of Dickinson’s vision and the thought that she’s able to stuff into tiny poems is now widely celebrated.