" Trees " is a lyric poem by American poet Joyce Kilmer. Written in February 1913, it was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in August and included in the 1914 Kilmer collection Trees and Other Poems . The poem, in twelve lines of verse verses from the iambic tetrameter, illustrates what Kilmer feels as the inability of art created by humans to imitate the beauty that nature achieved.
Kilmer is best remembered for "Trees", which have often become parodies and references in popular culture. The work of Kilmer is often belittled by critics and dismissed by scholars as too simple and too sentimental, and that his style is too traditional and even ancient. Nonetheless, the popular appeal of "Trees" has contributed to its durability. Guy Davenport's literary critic thinks of it as "a poem known to almost everyone". "Trees" are often included in the anthology of poetry and have been arranged for music several times - including popular renditions by Oscar Rasbach, performed by singers Nelson Eddy, Robert Merrill, and Paul Robeson.
The location for a particular tree as a possible inspiration for poetry has been claimed by several places and institutions connected to Kilmer's life; among them the Rutgers University, the University of Notre Dame, and cities across the country Kilmer visited. However, Kilmer's eldest son, Kenton, declares that the poem does not apply to a single tree - that he can apply equally to all. The "Tree" was written in the upstairs bedroom of the family home in Mahwah, New Jersey, which "looks down the hill, in the yard of our grassy forest". Kenton Kilmer states that while his father "is widely known for his affection for the trees, his affection is certainly not sentimental - the most prominent feature of the Kilmer property is the colossal wood pile outside his home."
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Mahwah: February 1913
According to Kilmer's eldest son, Kenton, "Tree" was written on February 2, 1913, when the family lived in Mahwah, New Jersey, in the northwest corner of Bergen County. The Kilmers live in the southwest corner of the intersection of Airmount Road and Armor Road in Mahwah for five years and the house overlooks the Ramapo Valley.
It was written in the afternoon in the interval of several other writings. The table was in the upstairs room, near a window facing the wooded hill. It was written in a small notebook where his father and mother wrote copies of some of their poems and, in many cases, added the date of the composition. On one page, the first two lines of 'Tree' appear, with dates, February 2, 1913, and on other pages, further in the book, are the full text of the poem. It was dedicated to his wife's mother, Ms. Henry Mills Alden, who loved all her family.
In 2013, the notebook mentioned by Kilmer's son was discovered by journalist and researcher Kilmer Alex Michelini at the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University in a collection of family papers donated to the university by Kilmer's grandson Miriam Kilmer. "Mrs. Henry Mills Alden" to whom this poem is dedicated is Ada Foster Murray Alden (1866-1936), mother of Kilmer's wife, Aline Murray Kilmer (1888-1941). Alden, an author, married Henry Mills Alden's editor Henry Mills Alden in 1900.
Kilmer Inspiration
Kilmer's poetry is influenced by his "strong religious beliefs and his dedication to the natural beauty of the world."
Although some communities across the United States claim to have inspired the "Tree", nothing can be founded specifically about Kilmer's inspiration except that he wrote poetry while living in Mahwah. The two widows of Kilmer, Aline, and her son Kenton denied this claim in their correspondence with the researchers and by Kenton in his memoirs. Kenton wrote to Notre Dame University researchers Dorothy Colson:
Mother and I agreed, when we talked about it, that Father never interpreted his poetry to be applied to a particular tree, or to trees in any special region. Only trees or all trees may be exposed to rain or snow, and it will be a suitable nesting place for robin. I think they should have branches up, too, for a line about 'lifting a leafy arm to pray.' Arrange the weeping willow.
According to Kenton Kilmer, the upstairs room where the poem was written, looked down on the hill above the family "forest grass" containing "trees of various kinds, from ripe trees to small trees: oaks, maple, black and white birch trees , and I do not know what else. "An interview published with Joyce Kilmer in 1915 mentions a large sweeping wooden pile at the Mahwah family's home:
... while Kilmer may be widely known for his affection for the trees, his affection is certainly not sentimental - the most prominent feature of the Kilmer property is the colossal wood pile outside his home. The house stood in the middle of the forest and what grass he got only after Kilmer spent months on weekends cutting trees, pulling stumps, and splitting wood. Kilmer's neighbors have difficulty believing that a man who can do that can also become a poet.
Maps Trees (poem)
Development and analysis
"Tree" is a poem of 12 lines in a strict iambic tetrameter. All but one line has eight complete syllabary Iambic tetrameters. The eleventh line, or second from the back, begins in the pressed syllable of the iambic foot and drops the no-pressure syllable - an acephalous (or "headless") catalact line - which produces an iambic line of seven akuncable tetrameters truncated. Creating a line catalytic meter can change the feelings of poetry, and is often used to achieve certain effects as a way of changing tones or announcing conclusions. The scheme of rhyme poems is a rhyming verse given aa bb cc dd ee aa .
Despite its simplicity in rhyme and meter, "Trees" is best known for the use of anthropomorphic personification and imagery: the poetry tree, which Kilmer describes as female, is portrayed as pressing his mouth to the Earth's chest, looking at God, and lifting the "lush arm" to pray. The poetry tree also has human physical attributes - it has a "hungry mouth", arm, hair (where the robin's nest), and a breast.
Rutgers-Newark's English professor and poet Rachel Hadas describes the poem as "rather small" even though the poem "is free of irony and self-awareness, except a small reference to deceive as I am in the end, which I find interesting." Scholar Mark Royden Winchell points out that Kilmer's portrayal of trees suggests the possibility that he has several different people in mind due to various anthropomorphic descriptions. Winchell argues that if the tree described is a single human it would be "anatomically deformed human".
"In the second stanza, the tree is a baby sucking a picture of Mother Nature, in the third hand is a petitioner who reaches his lush hand to the sky in prayer... In the fourth stanza, the tree is a girl with a gem (the nest of robin) in her hair, and fifth, it is a holy woman who lives alone with nature and with God.There is no warrant in poetry to say that it is a different tree that reminds the poets of different kinds of people. "
However, Winchell observes that "a fantastic series of analogy... can be presented in any order without destroying the overall structure of his poetry".
Publication and acceptance
Publications
The "Tree" was first published in the August 1913 edition of Poems: A Magazine of Verse. The magazine, which began publishing the previous year in Chicago, Illinois, quickly became "the main organ for modern poetry from the English-speaking world" which published early poet works that were a major influence on the development of twentieth-century literature. (including TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, HD, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay). Poetry paid Kilmer six dollars to print a poem, which soon succeeded. The following year, Kilmer entered the "Tree" in his collection of Trees and Other Poems published by George H. Doran Company.
Joyce Kilmer's reputation as a poet relies heavily on the wide popularity of this one poem. "Trees" are favored immediately on the first publication at Poetry: A Magazine of Verse ; when Trees and Other Poems were published the following year, the reviews in Poetry focused on the direction of "breeding" and the simplicity of the poem, finding naivety like a certain child in the "Tree", which gave him "unusual and haunting pain, but the same reviews criticize the rest of the book, saying" many of the verses in this volume are very few. "
Despite the popular appeal of "Trees", most of Joyce Kilmer's works are largely unknown and have fallen into obscurity. Some of his poetry options, including "Trees", are often published in anthologies. The "Tree" began to appear in anthology soon after the death of Kilmer 1918, the first inclusion being the Louis Untermeyer Popular attractions
With the "Tree", Kilmer is said to have "rediscovered simplicity", and the simplicity of the message and its delivery is the source of its appeal. In 1962, English professor Barbara Garlitz recounted that the undergraduate students considered the poem "one of the best poems ever written, or at least very good" - even after its technical error was discussed - for its simple message and that it was " painting such beautiful pictures ". The students point to "how true the poem is," and it appeals to both students 'romantic attitudes toward nature' and their appreciation for life, nature, entertainment, and beauty because of its message that "God's works are truly beyond the limit. weak on creation ". Considering this sentiment, the timeless popularity of "Trees" is evidenced by its association with the annual Arbor Day celebrations and tree planting memorials as well as several parks named in honor of Kilmer, including Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness and Joyce Kilmer Memorial. Forest tracts in the Nantahala National Forest in Graham County, North Carolina.
The "Tree" has been described by literary critic Guy Davenport as "a poem known to almost everyone". According to journalist Rick Hampson, the "Tree" was "memorized and recited by generations of students... It entertained troops in the trenches of World War I. It was set for music and set on stone, declared in the opera house and vaudeville theater, reported at the ceremony every April on Arbor Day. "According to Robert Holliday, Kilmer's friend and editor," Tree "speaks" with an authentic song for the simplest heart ". Holliday added that this "beautiful title poem is now universally known to make his reputation more than anything he has written together" and "made for widespread immediate popularity".
Critical reception
Some critics - including his contemporaries and Kilmer scholars - have dismissed Kilmer's work as too religious, simple, and overly sentimental and suggest that his style is too traditional, even old-fashioned. The poet Conrad Aiken, a contemporary of Kilmer, railed his work as unoriginal - just "imitating sentimental bias" and "running out of the same faint passion, broken hearts and the same old love, distant ghost distillation smells too familiar". Aiken characterized Kilmer as "whore in sweet and sweet" and "clinger pale mouthed into artificial and old-fashioned".
Kilmer is considered among the Romantic era poets because his poetry is conservative and traditional in style and does not violate any of the formal rules of poetry - a style that is often criticized today for being too sentimental to be taken seriously. The entire corpus of Kilmer's work was produced between 1909 and 1918 when romanticism and sentimental poetry fell out of favor and deep-rooted Modernism - especially with the influence of the Lost Generation. In the years following Kilmer's death, poetry went in dramatically different directions, as seen in the works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and academic criticism grew with him to keep the verse more sentimental and straightforward.
The poem was criticized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their textbook Understanding Poems first published in 1938. Brooks and Warren are two major contributors to the New Criticism movement, in which supporters oppose the use of literature in lieu of religion. Proponents of New Criticism analyze poetry on their aesthetic formulas and exclude reader responses, author intent, historical and cultural context, and moralistic bias of their analysis. They attribute the popularity of the Tree largely to religious appeal and believe it is "an unrelated stock response, thus, with poetry", adding:
"It praises God and appeals to religious sentiments.Therefore, people who do not stop to look at the poem itself or to study images in poetry and think about what poems actually say, tend to accept the poem because of the sentiments that pious, prioritized small images (which in itself attract stock responses), and mechanical rhythms. "
Literary critic Mark Royden Winchell believes that Brooks and Warren's criticism of Kilmer's poetry is primarily to show that "it is sometimes possible to learn much about poetry from such bad poems from the good".
Unclaimed claims about inspiration
Due to the popular appeal of "Trees", several local communities and organizations throughout the United States have staked their claim on the origin of the poem. While family member accounts and documents strongly establish Mahwah as the place where Kilmer wrote the poem, several cities across the country have claimed that Kilmer wrote "Trees" while living there or that certain tree in their city inspired the writing of Kilmer. The local tradition in Swanzey, New Hampshire confirms without proof that Kilmer wrote the poem while summarizing it in the city. Montague, Massachusetts, claims that both "broad maple dominate the land near the hospital where Kilmer was once treated" or "maple spreading in the yard of an old house" inspired poetry.
In New Brunswick, New Jersey, Kilmer's hometown, the claim involves a large white tree on the campus of Cook College (now School of Environmental Science and Biology), at Rutgers University. This tree, "Kilmer Oak", is estimated to be more than 300 years old. Due to being diluted by age and disease, Kilmer Oak was removed in 1963, and in reporting by The New York Times and other newspapers, local tradition was repeated with the claim that "Rutgers said it could not prove that Kilmer was inspired by an oak tree. "Today, saplings of historic tree seeds are being grown on site, throughout Middlesex County and central New Jersey, as well as in the main arboretum around the United States. The original remains of Kilmer Oak are currently stored in storage at Rutgers University.
Due to the close identification of Kilmer with Roman Catholicism and his correspondence with many priests and theologians, a tree located near a cave dedicated to the Virgin Mary at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, has been expressed as the inspiration for the poem. According to Dorothy Corson, the claim was first made by a priest named Henry Kemper. There are some notes that Kilmer visited the Notre Dame campus to give lectures and visit friends, but none of these accounts or events were held before 1914.
In the 1997 essay titled The Geography of the Imagination , American author Guy Davenport showed a different inspiration for Kilmer poetry.
"The tree is a favorite symbol for Yeats, Frost, and even the young Pound... But Kilmer has read about the trees in other contexts [,] moves to stop child labor and set up a children's school in the slums... Margaret McMillan" , Has had the wonderful idea that breathing fresh air and intimate acquaintance with grass and trees is feasible for all the pencils and tables throughout the school system.... English for gymnasium equipment is a 'tool.' And in his book and Children (1907) You will find this phrase: 'Apparatus can be made by fools, but only God can make trees.'
It seems that Davenport must be loosely and misinterpreted the sentiments expressed by McMillan, because this exact quotation does not appear in the text. In contrast, McMillan reveals the observation that some nineteenth-century writers, including William Rankin, William Morris, and Thomas Carlyle, opposed the effects of machinery on society and skills and thus avoided machine-made goods. Davenport's observations may be derived in several ways from McMillan's examination and quote about Carlyle:
"He (Carlyle) often makes comparisons between men and machines, and even trees and machines, greatly hurting the latter, for example, 'O, that we can replace the god of machines and put the human god in its place!' and 'I can not find any semblance of life so real as this tree! Beautiful! Machine of the universe!'
Adaptation and parody
Music adaptation
Some of Kilmer's poems, including "Trees", are set for music and published in England by Kilmer's mother, Annie Kilburn Kilmer, who is an amateur writer and composer. The musical arrangement is more popular than Kilmer poetry composed in 1922 by American pianist and composer Oscar Rasbach. This arrangement has been made and recorded frequently in the twentieth century, including Ernestine Schumann-Heink, John Charles Thomas, Nelson Eddy, Robert Merrill, Perry Como, and Paul Robeson. Rasbach songs appeared on popular network television shows, including All in the Family, performed by Wayne and Wanda puppets on The Muppet Show, and as a feature animation segment featuring Fred Waring and Pennsylvanians performing songs in the 1948 animated film Melody Time , the last of the short film anthology features produced by Walt Disney.
Rasbach's arrangements have also been reviled, especially in our short film "Arbor Day" (1936), directed by Fred C. Newmeyer, in which Alfalfa (played by Carl Switzer), singing the song with a whining sound and tense after the dialogue "loggers, release the tree" with Spanky (George McFarland). Film critic Leonard Maltin calls this "the worst of all time" poems. In his album Caught in the Act, Victor Borge, while playing a request, responded to an audience member: "Sorry I do not know 'Doggie in the Window' I know that comes pretty close to it" and went on to play the Rasbach setting from "Tree".
The Dutch composer Henk van der Vliet entered the setting of "Trees" as the third in a set of five songs written in 1977, which included text by poets Christina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Kilmer, Matthew Prior, and Sir John Suckling.
Parody
Due to the varying acceptance of Kilmer's poetry and his simple poem and meter, he has been the model for some parodies written by poets and poets. Keeping with the tetrameter tetrameter of Kilmer and its rhyme scheme, and a reference to the original rhyme thematic material, such parodies are often instantly recognizable, as seen in "Song of the Open Road" written by poet and humorist Ogden Nash: "I think that I'll never see/A beautiful billboard like a tree./Indeed, unless the billboard falls,/I'll never see a tree at all. "
A similar sentiment was expressed in the 1968 episode of the Wacky Races animation series titled "The Wrong Lumber Race", where the evil Dick Dastardly cuts down trees and uses them as a roadblock against other riders, proudly states: "I think I will never see a beautiful barrier like a tree. "
Furthermore, Trappist monk, poet and spiritual writer Thomas Merton uses Kilmer poetry as a model for a parody called "Chee $ e" - with a dollar sign intentionally substituted for the letter "s" - where Merton mocks the lucrative sale of homemade cheeses by his monastery, Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. This poem was not published during Merton's lifetime. Merton often criticized "commodifying monastic life and business for profit", claiming that it affects the well-being of spirits. In his poem, Merton attributes his parody to "Joyce Killer-Diller".
Like Kilmer, Merton is a graduate of Columbia University and a member of his literary society, the Philolexian Society, who hosted the annual Poetry Poetry Competition of Joyce Kilmer since 1986. The "Tree" is read at the end of each year.
The Kilmer poem was recited in the 1980 movie Superman II, as well as the 2006 director's piece. In that scene, Lex Luthor's criminal (played by Gene Hackman) and the other goes into Superman's Fortress of Solitude and finds a video the elder (John Hollis) of the planet Krypton who read "Tree" as an example of "poetry from the literature of the Earth". Luthor mocked the poem.
References
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External links
- Joyce Kilmer Poem (1918)
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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