The Old Road to Paradise
by Margaret Widdemer
Summary
The Old Road to Paradise is Margaret Widdemer's second collection of poems, published by Henry Holt in 1918 while the First World War was still being fought, and dedicated to her mother. Widdemer, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1884, had first drawn notice with The Factories (1915), a poem about child labor, and many of the new poems had already appeared in magazines from Poetry and The Dial to Harper's and Good Housekeeping. The book gathers nearly eighty short lyrics in seven sections: The Old Road to Paradise, The Singing Wood, Being Young, Womenfolk, People, Wistfulness, and Love Songs.
The opening section is the war. The title poem sets a dark wartime Easter against a crowded road to heaven, where Saint Martin in his colonel's cloak, Joan in her mail, and David with his sword stand to greet the young dead marching in rank on rank. "The Old Kings" wakes Arthur, Ogier, Charlemagne, and Roland to lead their hosts again, and "St. Jeanne Rides Out," dedicated to Amy Lowell, has Joan of Arc lay down her crown in heaven and ride back to the battle with the saints behind her. Quieter poems in the same section bring the war home: "Next Year" watches boys on an ordinary street and asks which of them will lie in France, and "Homes" sets a lamplit evening of children, kitten, and hearth against ashes on red snow somewhere far off. The Womenfolk section speaks for women directly, as in "Women," which tells men that whatever they fret to discover, Mary and Eve learned long ago. "The Dark Cavalier" makes death a patient last lover, a poem Widdemer kept and later used as the title of her 1958 collection.
Widdemer writes in rhyme and regular meter almost throughout, in the ballad and song forms the New Poetry was then abandoning, and only a few pieces such as "In an Office Building," a dream of finding a friend's door empty, move into free verse. The manner is musical, sentimental, and easy to read, closer to the magazine verse of its decade than to the modernists. It suits readers curious about how American poetry consoled itself during the war, and anyone who likes the ballad voices of "Mary, Helper of Heartbreak" and "When I Was a Young Girl" that run through it.
Historical Context & Significance
Joseph Pulitzer's will said nothing about poetry. For the 1918 and 1919 cycles the Poetry Society of America funded a special citation, called at the time the Columbia University Poetry Prize, and in 1919 the jury split it between The Old Road to Paradise and Carl Sandburg's Cornhuskers, a year after Sara Teasdale's Love Songs had taken the first. The Pulitzer board created its own Prize for Poetry only in 1922, when Edwin Arlington Robinson's Collected Poems won.
Widdemer married the writer and cellist Robert Haven Schauffler that same year and went on to a long career, mostly in prose: more than forty novels, children's books, and manuals on writing. She returned to verse with The Dark Cavalier in 1958, and in Golden Friends I Had (1964) recalled her friendships with Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She died in 1978. Sandburg's half of the prize is the half people remember, but her book remains easy to find in digitized copies.