The Poet's Shack

My alma mater was in the vanguard of offering a "poet in residence" position which, around 1920, was offered to Percy MacKaye:





Excerpt from Havighurst's The Miami Years

On the 1920s poet-in-residence Percy MacKaye:

...it was natural that [university] President Hughes should think of establishing an artist's fellowship at Miami. When he asked where he might find the right artist, the Stillman-Kelleys had the answer. Soon Percy MacKaye and his family arrived in Oxford.

A house was ready for them, on the site of present Hamilton Hall, but MacKaye looked doubtfully at an airless work room on the balcony of the Library, with a row of windows just under the high ceiling. What he wanted was a low roof and a fireplace. Three months later he moved into a studio cabin--the students called it "the poet's shack"--in the deep woods of the lower campus. That winter at a plank table beside the broad fireplace he began writing a long narrative poem.

Inland among the lonely cedar dells
Of old Cape Ann, near Gloucester by the sea,
Still live the dead in homes that used to be.

When Dogtown Common was finished in March 1921, MacKaye read it to a group in the Stillman-Kelley studio. He had a cold that evening. Coming in out of the raw night he looked both drawn and swollen. When he took off his coat there was a hot water bottle, slung around his neck. But in the swing of his reading--

There lie the lonely commons of the dead--
The houseless homes of Dogtown. Still their souls
Tenant the black doorsteps and the cellar holes. . . .

...he forgot his distress. Warmed by his own voice he threw off the hot water bottle and gave himself to the spectral tale of witchcraft in colonial New England. A few nights later he read the poem to an audience of students and faculty in Benton Hall. He was a slender, intense and lonely figure on the wide platform, a hand darting up to push back his loose shock of hair, his voice rising and falling like the sea-surge of Cape Ann.


"the poet's shack"
__

Occasionally MacKaye left the campus for a lecture trip or a visit to his publishers. During this first Ohio winter he met Robert Frost in New York. Frost: "Percy, where are you living now?" MacKaye: "I'm at a college. In Ohio." Frost: "What are you doing there?" MacKaye: "Just living, writing. Robert, you ought to get a college to support you." Frost: "How can I get one?" MacKaye: "I'll talk to President Hughes. He'll have an idea." A few months later Robert Frost became poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan.

Meanwhile Frost had written to MacKaye in Oxford: "The arts seem to have to depend on favor more or less. In the old days it was the favor of kings and courts. In our day far better your solution, that it should be colleges, if the colleges could be brought to see their responsibility in the matter. We are sure to be great in the world for power and wealth. . . . But someone who has time will have to take thought that we shall be remembered five thousand years from now for more than success in war and trade. Someone will have to feel that it would be the ultimate shame if we were to pass like Carthage (great in war and trade) and leave no trace of spirit."

*

From Percy MacKaye:

The Automobile
    By Percy MacKaye  (1875-1956)

Fluid the world flowed under us: the hills
        Billow on billow of umbrageous green
        Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen
One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills
And silver-rising storms and dewy stills
       Of dripping boulders, till the dim ravine
       Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene
Coverts grew loud with our tumultuous wills.

Then all of Nature's old amazement seemed
        Sudden to ask us: "Is this also Man?
        This plunging, volant, land-amphibian
What Plato mused and Paracelsus dreamed?
        Reply!" And piercing us with ancient scan,
The shrill, primeval hawk gazed down -- and screamed.