MAXWELL BODENHEIM
By Witter Bynner
While poets have been placed by the critics in this or that category and have lent themselves more or less to the indignity, Maxwell Bodenheim has continued as he began, a poet of disturbing originality. Whether you like him or not, you can not evade him. Let him once touch you and a perfume is upon you, pungent and yet faint, offensive and yet delicate, of the street and yet exotic. It is as if Pierian springs bubbled crystalline from the nearest sewer, forcing from you a puzzled and troubled enjoyment. It is as if a diamond leered or a rose exhaled sulphur or a humming-bird lanced your self-respect. It is a drunken thief's hand, still deft, in the poetic treasury; nuances pouring Niagaran; sensibilities crowding in masquerade; madness mocking sanity; ideas dancing nude through confetti; a falsetto growl; a whispered song; a rainbow in the loose:—and yet, all the while a human eye watching the incredible kaleidoscope, an eye that sees and makes you see likewise, good and evil, beauty and pain, opposing and commingling their designs. Historically Bodenheim's work is likely to share with Donald Evans' very different "Sonnets from the Patagonian" the distinction of having initiated in American poetry for better or worse the season and influence of fantastic impressionism. Evans has now become almost orthodox, his green orchid is put away; but Bodenheim still wears in his lapel the coloured ghost of a butterfly-wing whose veinings mock at human progress.
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