Lincoln Kirstein

• Born: May 4, 1907
• Birthplace: Rochester, New York
• Died: January 5, 1996
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other literary forms

Lincoln Kirstein published one autobiographical novel, Flesh Is Heir: An Historical Romance (1932), numerous books on the history of the ballet and ballet appreciation; and articles on his life and friendships. He cofounded and served as coeditor of Hound and Horn magazine, a literary periodical, while an undergraduate student at Harvard University in the late 1920’s.

Achievements

As a poet, Lincoln Kirstein is best known for Rhymes of a Pfc, which poet W. H. Auden described as the most honest appraisal of life during World War II. He received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984. Kirstein received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 and the National Medal of Arts in 1985 for his career accomplishments as the founder of the American School of Ballet and the New York City Ballet, among other dance organizations.

Biography

Lincoln Edward Kirstein was born in Rochester, New York, to Louis E. and Rose Stein Kirstein. His family later moved to Massachusetts. Kirstein’s father was the head of the Boston Public Library. Kirstein’s mother was a daughter of the Stein family, owners of the Stein-Bloch department stores in Rochester. Kirstein attended Phillips Exeter and graduated from the Berkshire School. Upon gaining admission to Harvard, he deferred for a year, starting in 1926, to work a year in the Connick stained-glass factory in Boston. A sequence of short poems in Low Ceiling records his experiences.

As a student at Harvard, Kirstein encountered such teachers as Alfred North Whitehead, whose lectures on metaphysics Kirstein attended. He was not a very dedicated student, but he had a way of absorbing culture and information just by being in conversation with people more learned than he or who had different experiences and backgrounds. He said reading Charles H. Grandgent, who translated Dante for the general reader, was the most important of his academic and literary experiences.

Kirstein formed two arts societies before he graduated from Harvard in 1930. The first was for the literary magazine Hound and Horn, which he edited with Varian Fry, starting in 1927, with its title taken from the poetry of Ezra Pound, and in 1928, he started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Hound and Horn featured writing by many important literary figures, including Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters, and Seán O’Faoláin. It was admired by T. S. Eliot and favorably reviewed in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In 1931, Kirstein moved to Manhattan, and in January, 1934, after persuading choreographer George Balanchine to come to the United States, Kirstein started the School of American Ballet. In 1941, Kirstein married Fidela Cadmus. For the rest of his life, he was among the most prominent figures in the New York performing arts world. Among his civic duties, Kirstien was the chairman of the Pierpont Morgan Library’s Council of Fellows in the late 1950’s and was an avid antique collector, especially of William Shakespeare memorabilia. His correspondence with book and antique dealer George Heywood Hill reveals Kirstein’s sense of humor, his political support of the Civil Rights movement, and his passions and frustrations with the ballet. He died in New York in January, 1996.

Analysis

In a prefatory statement to his 1987 collection of poetry, The Poems of Lincoln Kirstein, Lincoln Kirstein says he wanted to be an artist, but he felt he lacked the requisite talent to succeed. Of his poetry writing he said, “I liked to write verse; this was always play with no pretension. . . . Failing as dramatist and screenwriter, light verse served instead, with its game enhanced by rhythm, rhyme, and meter.” Later, in his memoir Mosaic: Memoirs (1994), he elaborated, “I never had any focused aim to become a ’poet.’ I liked to write light verse and later, in the army I produced bunch of rhymes, the result of a pastime filling gaps in duty” as a driver and translator for the U.S. Army.

Kirstein favored the long line in his poetry, simple rhetorical devices and standard features such as iambics and couplets for his rhymes. He wrote to tell stories about a particular slice of life, describing the scene with visual and emotional accuracy from several points of view—his own as poet-speaker, that of his peers, and those from the world at large.

Kirstein named his models in verse writing as Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. In Rhymes of a Pfc, he is particularly indebted to Kipling, whom he saw as the most competent and poetically versatile spokesperson of World War I. Kirstein employs irony in some of his poetry, but typically he relies on a Romantic interest, almost Wordsworthian emphasis, on the uniqueness of individuals and the beauty of nature. Rhymes of a Pfc enabled Kirstein to manage the diversity of people and situations in wartime. Kirstein’s poetry presents marked and striking skill in literary portraiture. The poems have specificity and particularity, proving Kirstein was an experienced observer of human nature.

Low Ceiling

The poems in Low Ceiling, Kirstein’s first collection, dedicated to his friend Muriel Draper, also provide an opportunity to reflect on the different roles people play in their normal lives. The poems about his father’s early career as a salesperson resonate with compassion for the man who travels to a new town every day and has no real permanence or opportunity to reflect on his present or future opportunities. “Best Man’s Song” is the story of a man looking on a pair of lovers with the eyes of experience. He sees the young “actor” without his makeup and stage identity able to attract a woman to marry him, and the speaker seems both worried and wistful, as though the actor has done something he is not ready to do.

The book also houses several longer poems, including “Lieder for Hitler,” dedicated to British poet Stephen Spender; “Chamber of Horrors”; and “Change of Heart.” The first is a sequence of five poems that concludes, “The spirit of Evil is loose in the land” and describes in the sequence how Adolf Hitler seemed to have taken Europe by surprise in his rise to power. “Chamber of Horrors” is presented as a mock trial of murderers detailing their premeditated acts of violence to each other. The last poem of the book, “Change of Heart,” describes an “Actor” or a man’s quest for place and fame in the world of “Muchness in Richness” and how, in the end, he is alone and discarded by those who would praise him once as he “adored delusion” and deluded himself that those around him really cared about him.

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. The speaker of many of these poems can be summed up in the character Kirstein creates for “Ghost Pasture,” “a bright somnambulist . . . Outlawed, a guest disinherited, Rootless, a wanderer . . . bidden here . . . to dream.”

Rhymes of a Pfc

Rhymes of a Pfc was first published in 1964 as a collection of sixty-five poems. The second edition of 1967 featured eighty-five poems, and the third separately published edition contained ninety-five poems in 1980. The third printing is the version included in the 1987 Poems of Lincoln Kirstein, with its explanatory notes identifying terms, places, people, and literary styles he used. It is evident Kipling influenced these poems in form and style as well as in content choices. From Kipling, Kirstein learned what to write about in a war, while from Hardy and Auden he learned how to provide depth in the narrative mode. For example, Kipling’s “Paget M.P.” provides a model for the individual character studies Kirstein produces, while “Arithmetic of the Frontier” allows Kipling the opportunity to address the ironies of war and the wisdom it brings.

The collection is dedicated to poet Marianne Moore, and, as the title indicates, the poems rhyme. They range in subject matter from narratives of experience to descriptions of locations and treatments of ideas. In Visions of War: World War II in Literature and Popular Culture (1992), David K. Vaughan writes that “Lincoln Kirstein was an exceptional poet as well as a lyrical historian of an era.”

The first three poems in the section labeled “World War I” describe how that war shaped Kirstein’s life. He mentions the soldiers he saw on parade and records some childhood memories of ingenuity and suffering. The opening is consistent with the type of calculated craftsmanship that caused Vaughan to speculate that the revisions were consistent with Kirstein’s aim to make Rhymes of a Pfc “a complete poetic statement about the war.”

The second part of the book, “ Stateside,” with its fourteen poems, charts the soldiers’ progress through basic training to overseas tours of duty. Poems in this section describe the discipline of the drill sergeant and the men’s reactions to Army life. The third and fourth parts of the book contain fifty-two poems. In these sections, he creates accomplished character sketches and a narrative of the daily experiences of the soldiers. Kirstein’s focus is on the hardships of war on the soldiers. He attempts to balance his interpretation of England as a literary and historical subject against what he sees in such poems as “Tudoresque,” in which at the poem’s midpoint he asks, “What England meant to me/ Apart from bards on Widener’s shelves and Jim Agee’s brandied voice?” Here he is attempting to balance what he read in the Harvard library and heard from his friend the critic James Agee with “Britain: its earth” and the war-ravaged people he encounters.

When he is posted to France, the subject of the third part of the book, Kirstein writes of the stress of battle on his unit in such poems as “AWOL,” in which a “Texan combat engineer” gets drunk, commandeers a jeep, and tries to escape. As the poet writes, “from this man’s army he resigns.” In “Air Strike,” Kirstein’s interest in vivid adjectival lines is evident. This is characteristic of his later ballads and is first seen here in such lines as, “This was the morning to recall: steep azure, stunning, diamond-bright,/ An empty cloudless bell-clear shell, stupendous scale for such a sight.”

The fourteen poems in the “Germany” section continue the theme of conflict and conflicting perspectives, as may be seen in “Das Schloss” (the castle), in which the poet-soldier comes upon a seventeenth century castle full of the “dynastic display of German legend.” The soldiers have come to occupy the castle and have to explain to the countess that she must step aside for them as her son plays classical music in another room. For Vaughan, “ Siegfriedslage” is the central poem not just of this section of the book but also of the whole collection, as it addresses how art can mediate the difficulties of war. The poem is based on Kirstein’s chance encounter in Germany with his hero, W. H. Auden, the “Morden” of the poem. In the poets’ conversation, Kirstein is able to define and assert the role of art in the modern world. “Scraps” is an experimental poem in the collection, composed of scraps of headlines, postcards, and other forms of writing about the war.

“Peace” is the sixth section of the book, with its eight retrospective poems. As the war ends, there is talk of monuments and celebrations; yet such enthusiasm is tempered by “Dear John” narrating a soldier’s wife’s decision to divorce her husband for a man she met on the swing shift. “Truce” focuses on soldiers’ return to “normal” as they become wise men telling stories to the “next crop’s youth” about the odds they faced and how they overcame them. The seventh and final section, “Postscript,” features four poems on the themes of lost innocence and alienation.

The Poems of Lincoln Kirstein

The Poems of Lincoln Kirstein was published in 1987 and has two sections. The first is “Poems of Patriot,” thirty ballads written between 1955 and 1985. The second half of the book is composed of Rhymes of a Pfc. Auden’s review of Rhymes of a Pfc from 1964 is appended. Auden especially admired Kirstein’s ability to reproduce the voices of the U.S. soldiers in what seemed to him an authentic way. Paul Fussell commented that Kirstein might well be considered the “greatest poet of the Second World War” given his accomplishments in Rhymes of a Pfc.

Here again, Kirstein uses the ballad form as a vehicle to show sensitivity to the varieties of people one encounters in daily life. The “urban section” opens the story of “Sunny Jim,” a waiter at a Greek-owned delicatessen in New York, and moves through to the story of a boy who wants to be ballet dancer in “Look, Ma! I’m Dancing.” The “Suburban” section commences with the story of a divorcing couple dealing with custody of their child in “Bar & Grille.” Again, like Kipling, Kirstein draws portraits of ordinary people, such as Tom and Fred, who need to tell Tom’s parents that Fred has acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The third section, “Between the Wars,” features narratives of life for soldiers after World War II, a poem on the United Nations, and two other poems on racial tensions—“Stars, Bar & Stripe” and “Domes,” a five-part ballad on how religion divides the peoples of the world.

The ballads are unified by their form and to some degree their tone more than their content. They present honest appraisals of human shortcomings, the role of pride and the lack of shame among people in their dealings with one another. The poems do not employ figurative language; they adhere to the conventions of poetic narrative, while any use of irony is circumstantial. In his poems, Kirstein is a nonjudgmental observer of human nature who lets the narrator or the lively characters he creates speak both as themselves and for themselves as he records the vagaries and varieties of lived life. There is an energy to all his poems that comes from his keen eye and his ability to use words precisely and evocatively.

Bibliography

Duberman, Martin. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Duberman’s biography of Kirstein contrasts his success with his personal torment. Kirstein had bipolar disorder, and although he was married for many years to a woman he loved, he also had many gay relationships.

Hamovitch, Mimi. The Hound and Horn Letters. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Collects the correspondence of the authors associated with Kirstein’s Harvard literary periodical. Includes a preface by Kirstein, reprinted in Mosaic on the evolution of the magazine.

Lefrak, Ashley, and Barbara Palfy, comp. Lincoln Kirstein: A Bibliography of Published Writings, 1922-1996. Edited by Peter Kayafas. New York: Eakins Press Foundation, 2007. Lefrak and Palfy have put together a bibliography of the published works of Kirstein.

Vaughan, David K. “Snapshots in the Book of War: Lincoln Kirstein’s Rhymes of a Pfc.” In Visions of War: World War II in Literature and Popular Culture, edited by M. Paul Holsinger and Mary Ann Schofield. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992. Discusses Vaughan’s view of the three voices in Kirstein’s poetry and overviews the themes of the Rhymes of a Pfc in a biographical context.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Words to Measure a War: Nine American Poets of World War II. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009. Vaughan looks at war poets, contrasting those who became famous before and during the war with those who became known as poets after the war, including Kirstein.

Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943. New York: Knopf, 1992. Art critic Weber looks at the lives of five artists, including Kirstein and his circle.