Spring Inspires Poetry in Greenwich Village
“For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
— Excerpt from the poem “A Cold Spring” by Elizabeth Bishop, who lived at 16 Charles Street.
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.”
The spring equinox has arrived, and New York City is tentatively embracing a warmer season: our parks and streetscapes are starting to bloom with tulips, daffodils, and cherry blossoms; the earth is slowly thawing. And who better to reflect upon these early, fleeting days of spring than poets, so many of whom have lived in Greenwich Village?
Village Preservation’s “Homes and Haunts of Great Writers” tour on our “Greenwich Village Historic District: Then & Now” map features many of the poets, novelists, essayists, and other writers who spent time within Greenwich Village in the 19th and 20th centuries. Read on to learn more about some of these literary figures and their homes, and for a selection of poems that they each wrote about the arrival of spring. These poems are a glimpse into a particular time as coincidentally, all were composed in or around the early 1920s.
E. E. Cummings, 4 Patchin Place
The poet e. e. cummings (1894-1962) — who variously used both upper and lowercase letters to sign his name — lived at No. 4 Patchin Place for four decades, until his death in 1962. Patchin Place was a cul-de-sac of small workingmen’s houses off of West 10th Street between Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, across from the Jefferson Market Courthouse (now the Jefferson Market Library). It was during his years on Patchin Place that cummings was his most prolific, experimenting with poetic form, bending the rules of grammar and linguistics, and implementing creative use of punctuation, spacing, and capitalization.
Spring is like a perhaps hand
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)andchanging everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)andwithout breaking anything.
— E. E. Cummings, first published in 1923
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 75 ½ Bedford Street
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) lived in several houses in Greenwich Village prior to moving with her husband to Austerlitz, New York in 1925. She is most often associated with her residence at 75 ½ Bedford Street, “the narrowest house in the Village,” where she lived from 1923-24. The house, a three-story building with an unusual stepped gable, is reminiscent of the Dutch tradition. Directly prior to her time on Bedford Street, she briefly lived at 156 Waverly Place. She also lived at 139 Waverly Place in 1917 after graduating from Vassar College.
The Greenwich Village Historic District designation report writes of Millay: “[A] gentle poet, her loving nature made itself felt to her generation, enriching their lives through its beauty.” According to the Millay Society, “In the immediate post-World War I era, Millay emerged as a major figure in the cultural life of Greenwich Village, when the Village served as an incubator of every important American literary, artistic, and political movement of the period. As part of this milieu, Millay’s work and life came to represent the modern, liberated woman of the Jazz age, free of the restrictions of the past…”
Spring
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, April 1921
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Mark Van Doren, 43 Barrow Street and 393 Bleecker Street
Writers and friends Mark Van Doren (1894-1972) and Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) shared an apartment at 43 Barrow Street in the 1920s. While living there, Van Doren met Dorothy Graffe, their next door neighbor and colleague at The Nation, whom he would later marry. Throughout his life, Van Doren published 20 books of poetry, along with several novels, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems in 1940. For years he taught at Columbia University, where Jack Kerouac was one of his more notable students.
In 1929, Van Doren moved to 393 Bleecker Street and was involved in creating Bleecker Gardens, an idyllic space shared by thirteen 19th-century town houses that front Bleecker and West 11th Streets. He and his neighbors agreed to remove the fences that separated their backyards in order to create a communal courtyard, which became a gathering place for writers and intellectuals.
Spring Thunder
Listen. The wind is still,
And far away in the night—
See! The uplands fill
With a running light.Open the doors. It is warm;
And where the sky was clear —
Look! The head of a storm
That marches here!Come under the trembling hedge—
— Mark Van Doren, 1924
Fast, although you fumble. . . .
There! Did you hear the edge
Of winter crumble?
Sara Teasdale, 1 Fifth Avenue
Sarah Teasdale (1884-1933) was already a published poet when she moved to New York in 1916 with her new husband, the businessman Ernst Filsinger. She divorced Filsinger in 1929 and later moved into an apartment at One Fifth Avenue. Her anthology, Love Songs, published in 1917, won the Columbia Prize for Poetry, a precursor to the Pulitzer Prize. Teasdale wrote technically classical poetry, often in the form of sonnets or quatrains. Her later anthologies like Flame and Shadow (1920), Dark of the Moon (1926), and Stars To-night (1930) exhibit the increased subtlety and depth of her work. Plagued with illnesses both physical and mental most of her life, Teasdale was found dead in her apartment at One Fifth Avenue in 1933 after having taken a lethal amount of barbiturates.
Spring in War-Time
I feel the spring far off, far off,
The faint, far scent of bud and leaf—
Oh, how can spring take heart to come
To a world in grief,
Deep grief?The sun turns north, the days grow long,
Later the evening star grows bright—
How can the daylight linger on
For men to fight,
Still fight?The grass is waking in the ground,
Soon it will rise and blow in waves—
How can it have the heart to sway
Over the graves,
New graves?Under the boughs where lovers walked
— Sara Teasdale, undated (near the end of World War I)
The apple-blooms will shed their breath—
But what of all the lovers now
Parted by Death,
Grey Death?
Robert Frost, 107 Waverly Place
Robert Frost (1874-1963) temporarily made his home at 107 Waverly Place in 1920. While living in the building, Frost met another poet, Percy MacKaye, who told Frost of his fellowship as poet in residence with Miami University at Ohio. This reportedly influenced Frost to seek the same position at University of Michigan; Frost was the poet in residence there from 1922 to 1924.
Frost received many honors during his lifetime, and is the only poet to have been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his work, and on July 22, 1961, was named poet laureate of Vermont. Although he never graduated from college, Frost received 40 honorary degrees including from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge and two from Dartmouth.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
— Robert Frost, 1923
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
View Village Preservation’s “Greenwich Village Historic District: Then & Now” map here, and click on the “Homes and Haunts of Great Writers” tour for more information.