Kirstein began his poetic career while still in high school at Berkshire Academy in Massachusetts. He published three poems in the student literary magazine, The Dome, in 1923, when he was 16. The poems range from fantasy, “A Garden Party in Simia” and “On Gin and Rum, the King of Cannabalia Dines,” to “Maudlin Meditations,” an expression of loneliness because of the separation from his family, especially his sister Mina. While at Harvard a few years later he published “March from the Ruins of Athens” (1926) in The Advocate; “Between the Bells,” “Return Ticket Paid,” (each 1927) and “Georgic” (1928), all published in Hound & Horn. The latter three poems were included in Low Ceiling. There was also a privately-printed poem to celebrate a marriage (1929).
Although these early poems are thematically challenging, they do reveal Kirstein’s grasp of rhyme and metrics, elements that are to appear more fulsomely in his later work. It may be fruitless to delve for deeper meaning; they may have simply been a way to provide him some relief from troublesome school days, or, as he writes later in Mosaic, “I had never had any really focused aim to be a ‘poet.’ I liked to write light verse and later, in the army, I produced a bunch of rhymes [Rhymes of a Pfc.], the result of a pastime filling gaps in duty” (Kirstein, 1994, 160). These may simply be considered light verse (like “Double Date”) yet, in “Maudlin Meditations,” with a more serious undercurrent.
In 1935 Kirstein published his first volume of poetry, Low Ceiling, when he was 28. Duberman writes that “Lincoln was modest about his poetry, usually preferring to call it ‘verse’; in preparing Low Ceiling (1935) for publication, Kirstein wrote ‘It’s not as if they are so damned good they can wait indefinitely to be printed.’” Duberman points out that the reviews “were largely favorable” (Duberman, 2007, 290; n. 1, 655). Additionally, in “Mr. Kirstein and the Cult of Obscurity” C.G. Poore notes that “the influence of Stephen Spender and Auden is manifest there [in the poem “The Words”] as clearly as it is in other parts of the book. . . . time and again the sharp effective image stands out though the whole poem is generally clouded by the prevailing low ceiling” (Poore, 1935, 39). Interestingly, according to Duberman, “Spender reassured Lincoln that he found the poems quite independent of any influence of his, and admired them a good deal” (Duberman, 2007, n. 1, 655). However, Poore also notes the main weakness in many of Kirstein’s poems in the book (and a charge that has been made about other work), that of the “low ceiling,” of obscurity, a verbosity that does not lend itself to reader understanding. A poem need not be “easy” to comprehend, but if we consider the validity of T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative then the poem should offer some signposts for meaning; if the poem is too personal and the imagery too private then the reader becomes lost and the poem lapses into the arcane. That said, Poore also notes that “the sharp effective image stands out” and often these images can redeem the poem to some degree. Then again, a poem must be more than the sum of its parts, more than a sprinkling of striking images. Laura Santagiuliana avers that Low Ceiling is “a rather irrelevant poetry collection” (Santagiuliana , 2014,172) although she does cite some of the positive reviews. (It should also be noted that in her dissertation she does not refer at all to the later Poems of a Patriot). Beverly Schneller further writes that the poems in Low Ceiling “also provide an opportunity to reflect on the different roles people play in their normal lives. . . . These early poems show Kirstein’s awareness of the evocative power of words. He uses words to offer pictures of daily life with its successes, failures, and ordinariness” (Schneller, 2023) This is true to a limited degree, but the poems cover much more territory than is perhaps suggested by Schneller. Be that as it may, a look at the centerpiece poem in Low Ceiling – “Lieder Fǖr Hitler” – provides an insight into Kirstein’s techniques and themes and reveals his awareness of the growing threat of Hitler and the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States.
Low Ceiling was published in the middle of the Depression and the rise of Nazism in Germany. Kirstein writes on the book jacket how, “The title, which has so much meaning in aviation, established the mood of many of these poems. The themes are varied: they indicate the range of thought of the new generation. The reader will find here a diminishing aestheticism, an increasing awareness of the manifold phases of the gigantic transition through which life is now moving, and a clear direction in which the poetic temperament and the race consciousness, tends.”
He also gives what could be a hint to the meaning of Low Ceiling in the “Prelude.” There is here a sense of change not merely in society at large but also the ways that poetry may address those changes. The scene depicted in the “Prelude” is an unnamed town (later “and all the towns”), in the evening. Onlookers watch “the nocturnal procession” while “men in the street walk into regiments,/Drums at the head of the column, not yet/In time, but tuning into time.” The procession draws new marchers from the crowd “straightening their guns.” The “Prelude” ends: “And quiet in all the other side streets of the town,/In all the towns, such other marching men/Shift step, stare quietly down the files/Of flags and drummers toward the public square.” The imagery portrays people following a martial tempo streaming into the “public squares” of all the (German? American?) towns. Kirstein was in Europe in the mid-1920’s and early 1930’s and was aware of the gradual rise of Fascism and anti-Semitism, there and in America. Could the “Prelude” reflect and reveal the rise of anti-Semitism, Nazism and German militarism and the possibility of the spread to the United States? Could this be part of the “gigantic transition” that Kirstein mentions? Duberman notes that Kirstein was alarmed by the rise of Fascism, and the thought that T.E. Lawrence could be a covert Fascist. According to Duberman “Lincoln started to fantasize about shooting Lawrence and began to write a play, The Leader, about the rise of an American Hitler, which was based on Lawrence as the villain and himself as his assassin” (Duberman, 2007,184). The “Prelude,” then, expresses in large part Kirstein’s fears.
Although it was eleven years from Kirstein’s experience in Bayreuth to “Lieder Fǖr Hitler” in Low Ceiling, an understanding of the context of the poem may be helpful. Kirstein was of German-Jewish heritage and was aware, through his mother Rose, of the artistic accomplishments of German culture, especially Richard Wagner and his “music-dramas.” In the summer of 1924, the 17-year-old Lincoln, his younger brother George, and their mother Rose, toured Europe for two months. They attended the Bayreuth productions of Wagner’s Ring cycle as well as Die Meistersinger with Lincoln writing that Bayreuth was “’a world wholly, profoundly, dedicated to the realization of the unreal, [and it] made a deep and lasting impression . . . ’” (Ibid, 26). Unfortunately, Kirstein also noted “the unhappy stink of ingrained prejudice” when he and his mother were refused a room at a local hotel, and later at the close of Die Meistersinger when the crowd rose “in an explosion of patriotic ferocity. . . What could my mother and I do but sit there and endure it? It was if some monstrous radio-newspaper or world-wide coverage were bellowing headlines of a nation’s revenge” (Mosaic, 1994, 65-67). These anti-Jewish and nationalistic sentiments were almost a decade before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and almost 15 years before Kristallnacht.
“Lieder Fǖr Hitler” is the key poem in Low Ceiling, and most reflects Kirstein’s “Prelude.” The poem, (dedicated to one of Kirstein’s poetic “heroes,” Stephen Spender), takes a broader scope than the Depression to warn about the rise of Hitler and the possibility of an American dictator. Kirstein went to Europe in June of 1933, returning in October. In Paris he observed German refugees in the streets, posters warning against Hitler and of “a French fascist party” (Duberman, 2007, 158). In Mosaic, Kirstein refers to Virgil Thompson’s comment about “the influx of self-exiles from Hitler, whose presence was signified by the mass of German automobile license plates visible in the streets” (Kirstein, 1992, 225). According to Duberman, upon Kirstein’s return to the USA he experienced more than a tinge of anti-Semitism from such acquaintances as architect Phillip Johnson, Alan Blackburn, and Esther Strachey, former wife of John Strachey. This rise was paralleled by Kirstein’s evolving “left-wing fervor” and he became “more active in left-wing politics” (Duberman, 2007, 238, 263).
The poem is in five sections, each section a stanza of around 20 lines with variable rhyme schemes. As with many of Kirstein’s poems the reader has to tease out the trees from the dense forest. Section one depicts an idyllic Germany of “dark south vineyards, southern orchards,/south green uplands, and on south clear mountains,/Good food and drink . . . .” An undisclosed “I” appears, who is the speaker in the section. He talks of what could be a lost love, but as the section ends the “her” takes on a bit of a different dimension: “My love is absent, sleeping, sleeping,/I dare not try to rouse her, nor her people.” Could “her people” be the German people? Is the “I” Hitler?
The second section might provide a clue. Now the third person: “The Chancellor, thinking of himself as Chancellor/(Not Bismarck) sagged on the drapes, stared out.” The outside world seems overturned, with “the insane light/Of sunset with no sun.” Armed guards patrol the grounds. There is a mood of indecision with an undercurrent of latent violence (“The pacer halts, grips his gun-stock tight;/My beauty in my bullets builds me best” but the “Chancellor” “Abruptly turns in doors, snatches cap and gloves,/Appears for the journey toward his loving friends.” So, if we assume that the “Chancellor” is Hitler (the title also gives a clue), he has made a decision to “journey” toward his supporters.
Section III begins with a description of his supporters and returns to the “I”:
My friends are fools and fiends: I love them well.
They are my sad support. I am their sweetest dream
Had I planned their portraits with an eye on hell
They’d be no crisper than they smartly seem.
In what could be seen as an insight into Hitler’s egomania, the “I” states:
I am most strong. I am openly ready
For any advertent or inadvertent seizure.
I think Caesar was less steady
In his large acts than I am in my leisure.
Section IV, the most abstruse stanza, references “Willy” and “Heinrich.” These names bring to mind Willy Johannmeyer and Heinrich Himmler (“Waldheim” is also mentioned, but it is unclear if that refers to the German city or to Kurt Waldheim), who became major figures in the Nazi Party. But would have Kirstein known about them in the early 30’s? Himmler might have been known, but Johannmeyer did not serve in the military until 1939, well after the publication of the book.
The final section returns to the third-person and opens with “The spirit of evil is loose in the land.” As the section develops there are images of violence: “Staggers, purple bruises, forceps, hating/are too blunt instruments for our assizes; . . . ” with the suggestion that the high courts are unable to deal with “the spirit of evil.” The poem ends with a remembrance of the “ideal” Germany sketched in the first section and the realization that that ideal is lost to the “random hell he realizes,” the “he” presumably being Hitler:
An epitaph, from memories sacked but quickening:
This was that country we can still remember,
Green in companions, forests, songs: now sickening
As wounds in the world’s ultimate December.
The poem certainly ends on a depressing note, and perhaps we can grant Kirstein some level of prescience about the rise of Nazism based on his experiences in Bayreuth in 1924, his awareness of the emigres leaving Germany in 1933, and his exposure to growing anti-Semitism in America. In the poem Kirstein takes a long look at what is evolving in Germany and potentially in America.
Taken as a whole, Low Ceiling reflects an era, the Depression and the backdrop of World War II, and is the stylistic and thematic progenitor of his later work. The adherence to rhyme scheme, use of irony, personal portraits, close observation of and exploration of identity, emotion, memory, and speakers using various personae, which are hallmarks of his subsequent poems, but also the prolixity and forced rhymes, are evident in Low Ceiling.
Kirstein expressed his “philosophy” of poetry in “The Words,” and this philosophy provides a window into much of his work. In the first part of the poem, he criticizes those “weasel-worded” writers who betray the truth with “Graphic scraps of news, slogans quoted to the breaking point” and extols the “lucky few,” like Spender and Auden, who “risk the noble lines.” He goes on to compare poetry writing to building an “edifice of fact/Which called for reading, yet lead to act”:
The words would glow; steel under press;
Neon for meaning, not a single guess
Could halt their heightened, quickened heart
From letting out their arteries at the start.
Kirstein wrote over 150 poems in 60-plus years, from 1923 to 1985, and while readers can debate the relative strengths and weaknesses of his oeuvre, there is no doubt that his poems became more accomplished over time in terms of subject, theme and technique. Whether the poems be introspective or explore social issues, war, or family relationships, at base Kirstein always attempted to search for “Mysterious truth, never self-evident.”
Works Cited above
Duberman, Martin. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Kirstein, Lincoln. Low Ceiling. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.
———-. Mosaic: Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
Poore, C.G. “Mr. Kirstein and the Cult of Obscurity,” The New York Times, July 28, 1935.
Santagiuliana, Laura. Lincoln Kirstein: Mosaic/Variety in “Rhymes of a PFC”, Masters degree dissertation, University of Venice, Italy, 2014 343990.pdf.pdf
Schneller, Beverly. Salem Press Biographical Encyclopaedia, 2023, unp. Salem Press, a division of EBSCO Publishing. Amenia, NY.
