Byron Vazakas described his poetry as “organic poetry” that derives from “the association between the artist’s life and his work,” so that poetry serves as “an extension of the personality.” He reinforced this statement by maintaining that “Unhappily, the connection between my life and my work will probably not be recognized except posthumously.”
Shaping InfluencesVazakas’ childhood introduction to literature came from his father, reading aloud the poetry of Byron and the works of Poe. Vazakas’ formal education ended with the eighth grade. After that, he was free to read whatever he liked. He absorbed T. S. Eliot and the Imagists, but his inclinations led him to the Symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry. He was deeply affected by Baudelaire and Rilke. Along with reading, he listened to classical music and studied art, guided to a great extent by his Reading friend, William Baziotes, who later gained fame as an abstract expressionist.
By 1935, Vazakas had written 1,500 poems imitating every style and rhyme scheme he had encountered. He regarded these as practice poems and asked his friend, Galleon editor Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, to destroy them, as he did, when Vazakas said he had found his true poetic voice. Only 22 early poems survive. Thus Byron Vazakas was able to emerge as a mature poet in his first volume,
Transfigured Night.
The literary friends that Vazakas cultivated gave him encouragement and support. Foremost of these was William Carlos Williams, who discovered Vazakas’ poetry at a crucial time in his own career. He credited Vazakas with inventing a new stanzaic technique that he called “the toy cannon” and lavished him with praise. In the Introduction to
Transfigured Night, he called him “that important phenomenon among writers, an inventor” because of his approach to the poetic line. Williams characterized Vazakas as “gentle-vitriolic, kind-inhuman, forgiving-obdurate, a poet whose urbanity is inviolate.” He observed that “Vazakas doesn’t select his material. . . . It is. Like the newspaper that takes things as it finds them,--mutilated and deformed, but drops what it finds as it was, unchanged in all its deformity and mutilation. . . .”
Marianne Moore responded warmly to Vazakas’ overtures and encouraged him from the start. In contrast, Wallace Stevens, in spite of the connection to Reading, his birthplace, was only coolly cordial, though later he was reported to have described Vazakas as a “clever fellow.” At various times Vazakas enjoyed an association with other writers: Tennessee Williams, John Ciardi, James Merrill, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, and Edwin Honig. He developed a friendship with the young novelist Maritta Wolff that lasted almost all his life.
Vazakas’ Subject MatterThe writers whom Vazakas admired convinced him to value his everyday experiences. These included the rich vein of material he mined from his “Edwardian childhood” in New York City and his boyhood in Lancaster, PA. He was a “walking poet” in the manner of Walt Whitman, and whatever he saw and reflected upon was grist for his poetic mill, whether it was in the Berks County countryside, the streets of Boston or London or Paris, or the run-down sections of Reading or Philadelphia.
The persona Vazakas presented in his first published piece, the 5-line poem “Grief” in
The Galleon, became an enduring one.
- "I am known
- To winds that moan
- In grey clouds;
- In crowds
- I am alone"
From the start, Vazakas identified himself with the image of an outsider, a young man painfully and ironically aware of a romantic isolation as he argues with the world. He wanders alone in rural or urban settings feeling variously fearful or angry, lonely or trapped. Then comes a surge of spirit and a fierce will to survive. He escapes in a number of ways: the pleasure of reliving the past, the love of a friend and the security of home, and the joy of music, art, and nature. A vacillation between the pessimistic and the optimistic approach creates an emotional counterpart in the poetry.
Vazakas’ own painful feelings as an outsider led him to empathize with others who experienced feelings of isolation or alienation. His subjects include writers and painters (Federico García Lorca, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman); people who stepped outside the moral code (Oscar Wilde); political radicals (Rosa Luxemburg); people forced into violent situations against their will; and, eventually, the dregs of society. Vazakas observed people of the “nether world” only from a distance, but he lauded the rare individuals who serve down-and-out people without trying to reform them.
Vazakas was proud to be characterized as a poet who demonstrated a “moral fervor” in his approach to life. He was a humanist who emphasized the importance of free will in the search for truth and goodness. To him, morality was “the ethical treatment of others.” He abhorred the deliberate loss of life, whether from the death penalty or from military initiatives that forced young men to be candidates for an early death or to “kill without anger.” He approved of suicide if that was the only honorable course of action that enabled an individual to take control of his life.
The Mode of the PoetryIn 1944 Vazakas described his poetry as “a kind of cadenced prose with the poetry in the content . . . rather than in the practice.” He abhorred the strictures imposed by rhyme, meter, and traditional “forms” like the sonnet. Instead, he emphasized the value of “the words themselves” in conveying “an attitude or aspect personally experienced and felt.” Three decades later Vazakas revised that first description. He said, “It may sound like merely cadenced poetry, but most is pure iambic.” He explained that the iambic mode might be obscured by the lack of rhyme and the use of enjambment.
Vazakas called his poetry “lyric, but essentially dramatic,” whether the format is a one- or two-page poem employing the short stanza that William Carlos Williams called “the toy cannon” or a paragraph-length prose poem or a poem with longer, looser lines. The drama is evident, he said, in the frequent occurrence of “scenes, settings, and characters.” Vazakas enhances the dramatic presentation by writing customarily in present tense, thus inviting the reader into the state of mind the poem presents. He employs past tense in descriptions of action extending over a period of time or in reminiscences about his childhood.
Other CharacteristicsThe power of description is one of the immediately appealing features of the poetry. The early poems are full of condensed, fused images, a legacy from T. S. Eliot and the Imagists. The later poems rely less heavily on succinct clusters of images, but the quality of the images is consistently high.
Allusions to music and art abound in the poetry, in reflection of Vazakas’ devotion to the arts. Everywhere he went, he said, he took with him the remembered sounds of music, and, apparently, the remembered images of art. Not surprisingly for a writer who called himself an expressionist, he preferred the romantics in music and the impressionists in art.
Understatement occurs frequently. This element establishes an air of studied, ironic nonchalance. The irony is often gentle, except when the subject matter concerns injustice or inhumanity. Then it becomes open and accusatory.
Unadorned conversational statements help to create the “casualness” Vazakas said he aimed to achieve. The poet often seems just to be talking, making ordinary comments. Playing against this idiom, however, are flashes of wit, sometimes in the form of colloquial wording or slang at unexpected moments. Vazakas’ titles often add an extra dimension apart from the effect of the lines.
The language is customarily succinct. The word choice is sometimes “erudite, recondite, scholarly”; at other times “down to earth.” Vazakas said he was “constantly torn between the two” kinds of words. The more ordinary choices become dominant in the later poetry.
SummaryVazakas characterized his poetry by placing himself “midway between the pure literary, intellectual, cerebral and a man like Sandburg, particularly.” In contrast to Wallace Stevens, Vazakas called his own poetry “psychologic, graphic.” In a poem of his, he said, “Joe, the hatter,” would be an actual person, not a symbolic presence, and the subject of the poem would be “the suffering or hardships of Joe.” In Joe and all his counterparts, down to society’s seamiest outcasts, Vazakas expressed “the personal experience of everyman, in an appropriate form. In that respect,” he said, his poems “have something to say.”
(Sources are identified in the work of Patricia H. Hummel listed in the bibliography.)