Poems | Page 7

was afterwards
given a year out of school, with the family of his former tutor, in
Southern California -- again a region famed for its beauty. He returned
much improved in health, and after a concluding year at Hackley, he
entered Harvard College in 1906.
He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard,
and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at
college, his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and
contemplative than towards the active life. His brother, at this time,
appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous

disposition; and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after
contrasting, with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the
mediaeval ideals of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight
and I the Clerk, deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a
musty old volume than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But
about the middle of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his
habits of thought and of action. He emerged from his shell, made many
friends, and threw himself with great zest into the social life of his
comrades. It is evident, however, that this did not mean any slackening
in his literary interests. His work gives ample proof of real, if not of
systematic, culture. He genuinely loves and has made his own many of
the great things of the past. His translations from Dante and Ariosto, for
example, show no less sympathy than accomplishment. Very
characteristic is his selection of the Twenty-sixth Canto of the `Inferno',
in which the narrative of Ulysses brings with it a breath from the great
romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy that before he graduated
he took up with zeal and with distinction the study of Celtic literature --
a corrective, perhaps, in its cooler tones, to the tropical motives with
which his mind was stored. He was one of the editors of the `Harvard
Monthly', to which he made frequent contributions of verse.
There followed two years (1910-12) in New York -- probably the least
satisfactory years of his life. The quest of beauty is scarcely a
profession, and it caused his parents some concern to find him pausing
irresolute on the threshold of manhood, instead of setting himself a goal
and bracing his energies for its achievement. In 1911 his mother and
sister left Mexico, a week or two before Porfirio Diaz made his exit,
and the Maderists entered the capital. They returned to New York, to
find Alan still unsettled, and possessed with the thought, or perhaps
rather the instinct, that the life he craved for was not to be found in
America, but awaited him in Europe. In the following year he carried
his point, and set off for Paris -- a departure which may fairly be called
his Hegira, the turning-point of his history. That it shortened his span
there can be little doubt. Had he settled down to literary work, in his
native city, he might have lived to old age. But it secured him four
years of the tense and poignant joy of living on which his heart was set;
and during two of these years the joy was of a kind which absolved him
for ever from the reproach of mere hedonism and self-indulgence. He

would certainly have said -- or rather he was continually saying, in
words full of passionate conviction -- One crowded hour of glorious
life Is worth an age without a name.
It was in the spirit of a romanticist of the eighteen-forties that he
plunged into the life of Paris. He had a room near the Musee de Cluny,
and he found himself thoroughly at home among the artists and
students of the Latin Quarter, though he occasionally varied the `Vie de
Boheme' by excursions into "society" of a more orthodox type. Paris
has had many lovers, but few more devoted than Alan Seeger. He
accepted the life of "die singende, springende, schoene Paris" with a
curious whole-heartedness. Here and there we find evidence -- for
instance, in the first two sonnets -- that he was not blind to its seamy
side. But on the whole he appears to have seen beauty even in aspects
of it for which it is almost as difficult to find aesthetic as moral
justification. The truth is, no doubt, that the whole spectacle was
plunged for him in the glamour of romance. Paris did not belong to the
working-day world, but was like Baghdad or Samarcand, a city of the
Arabian Nights. How his imagination transfigured it we may see in
such a passage as this: By silvery waters in the plains afar Glimmers
the inland city like a star, With gilded gates