The King of Bohemia

STANLEY WERTHEIM
 

In his "Ode on the Centenary ofthe Binh of Robert Brown¬
ing," George Sterling ruefully acknowledged that his own
poetic impulse had little in common with Browning's satiric
realism, psychological acumen, and human empathy:

Nor would I hear
With thee, superb and clear
The indomitable laughter of the race;

Nor would I face
Clean Truth, with her cold agates of the well.

Nor with thee trace
Her footprints passing upward to the snows.

But sought a phantom rose

And islands where the ghosdy siren sings;

Nor would I dwell

Where star-forsaking wings

On mortal thresholds hide their mystery.

Nor watch with thee
The light of Heaven cast on common things.

Sterling's muse was devoted to an ambiguous Romantic ideal, the
momentary embodiment of fleeting Beauty in a pleasing sensation.
It is captured in his poem "To a Girl Dancing" in the image of a
movement by a young danseuse, "An evanescent pattern on the
sight—/Beauty that lives an instant, to become/A sister beauty and
a new delight." His prosodic formulations were traditional—blank
verse, the quatrain, ode, Petrarchan sonnet, and allegorical drama—
the metrical and stanzaic patterns perfected by Keats, Tennyson,
and Swinburne. Above all. Sterling sought to achieve lyrical effect,
and to this end he utilized archaic and poetic diction, apostrophe,
vague rhetoric, esoteric imagery, and a grandiose sweep of syntax.
These devices, as well as his brooding pessimism and fascination
with the bizarre, were obsolete in the poetic climate of such experi¬
menters as Robinson Jeffers (who admired Sterling), Ezra Pound,
Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot and made it almost inevitable that he
 

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