Melville Cane:
The Expressionist Spirit

JEFFREY CANE ROBINSON

REFLECTING, in his one hundred and first year, on the
formative influences of his life, Melville Cane recently
said to me: "I have often thought that my teacher
George Edward Woodberry, although he probably never read
him, had certain affinities to C. G. Jung." The comment confirmed
for me a suspicion that these two figures—friend and acquaintance
representing two apparenrly unrelated strands of modern Ameri¬
can culture—reinforced each other in Meh'ille Cane to nourish
and shape his over-riding principle of the creative process, in
poetry and in life. Woodberry helped to draw him into the orbit
of the Romantic expressionist spirit in American letters in the
early 1900s. With Jung he found that same spirit confirmed, given
authority, and expanded in the claim of ps\'choanalysis that the
self seeks liberation from its impediments for the sake of inner and
communal tasks. The Melville Cane Collection at Columbia in¬
cludes pieces from both of these figures, but even more impres¬
sively it documents the enduring and deepening interplay of these
two traditions in lerters from Joel Spingarn, Van Wyck Brooks,
Lewis Mumford, Sidney Cox, Henry Morton Robinson, A. R.
Orage, Gorham Munson, and others. By piecing together passages
from the correspondence and other writings and by placing them
in the context of Cane's Making a Poem, one can see unfold a
small but significant chapter in America's cultural past.

Melville Cane's best-selling book is not any of his eleven vol¬
umes of poetry but rather his Making a Poem, which comprises
seventeen miniature essays on the experience of writing poerry
and, generally, on the creative process. Hopefully, with time, this
situation will reverse itself, not because Making a Poem deserves

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