Capricious Winds

by Helen Birch Bartlett, Janet Fairbank (Introduction), Harriet Monroe (Introduction)

Poetry by Helen Birch Bartlett (1883-1925), the second wife of Frederic Clay Bartlett, a notable Chicago art patron and collector.

Genres: Poetry

91 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1927

Reviews

[Peter Nelson-King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Louise Birch (1883-1925) was a woman of enormous vitality, and lived with intensity and grace in her all-too-short life. As a young woman, she studied music with the notable Chicago teacher Bernard Ziehm, and used her talent and stature as the daughter of the powerful attorney Hugh Birch to become a fixture of Chicago's music scene, supporting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and publishing several art songs, all of which are extremely rare. She also wrote poetry, and became a friend and supporter of Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, still the most important poetry journal in America. She initially submitted her poems unsigned, and when Monroe agreed to publish them she revealed her identity, and for many years in the 1910's and '20's her poems appeared in Poetry. In 1919 she married Frederic Clay Bartlett, the notable art patron and collector, and the two of them began an intense and cosmopolitan existence, traveling the world and collecting art. Helen's artistic focus narrowed on poetry alone, and her social life and travelling made her production meagre. In 1925 Helen died of cancer in her early 40's. In her honor, Frederic donated 25 important early modernist paintings to the Art Institute of Chicago, and they remain the core of the institute's collection as they contain such works as Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and Pablo Picasso's "The Old Guitarist".

In 1927, Houghton Mifflin issued Capricious Winds, a volume containing all of Helen's poetry, and it included appreciative forwards by Monroe and Helen's friend Janet Fairbank, a notable opera singer who gifted a collection of scores to Chicago's Newberry Library, including some of Helen's songs, published and unpublished. All of the poetry is free verse, a style that had caused a fervor when it was first introduced to the American literary scene more than a decade before but had become accepted by that time. Houghton Mifflin was an important publisher of early modernist verse in America, putting out all of Amy Lowell's books as well as volumes by fellow free verse authors Hilda Doolittle, Walter Arensberg and Henry Bellamann, and Bartlett's poetry fit in nicely with that milieu. While not as consciously modernist as the work of Doolittle and the other Imagists, her poems still effectively use the freedom and uncluttering of free verse to effective ends.

Her best poems, such as "Sanctuary", "October in Illinois" and "Silver and Charcoal", are among the shortest, where her focus on direct, evocative picture-painting pays off in the best fashion of Imagism. Her longer poems lose impact, and if she had lived longer a more judicious editor might have left out some of the chaff for the wheat she could have produced. I personally would have entirely omitted section IV, "The Tallahassee Limited", and perhaps a couple of other poems. Her subject matter is mostly domestic, but section V, "Shadows on the Shoji", depicts scenes from Japan that betray Bartlett's similar interests to the previous generation of American artists who could be classed as Aestheticists. I feel her work pairs best with that of James McNeill Whistler, mostly representational but with flashes of abstraction, and always pursuing beauty for its own sake. Or, for an example from the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, look to Charles Demuth's painting "Flowers (Cyclamen)", a precursor to his Precisionist work. While edging into Cubist territory, the painting is still recognizably of the flowers and are imbued with a lovely balance of color and lighting that wouldn't be out of place in a fine fin-de-siecle home of the 1910's or '20's.

I'm very happy the book was issued, as it is a fine addition to the early free verse scene in America and an example of how new techniques mingled with old moods and images. Progress is a scatter graph, not a march, and the high quality of much of the poetry here has real historical interest even if it doesn't exactly resemble Imagism all the time. I must also tip my hat to whoever did the amazing dust jacket art, which is more modern than anything in the book and deserves note as an outstanding piece of Cubist book art.