Ephemera

Ephemera is Russ Brissenden’s poem and, after his death, the center of a literary controversy that exposes the distance between artistic recognition and genuine understanding. Martin Eden sends it to a magazine against Brissenden’s advice, hoping that publication will establish its value; The Parthenon does accept and prominently print it, but its publicity and the ensuing public debate transform the poem into a commercial spectacle. The episode turns Martin’s apparent victory into a painful confirmation of his friend’s distrust of the magazines.

Submission and Acceptance

The morning after Brissenden had fallen asleep, ill and exhausted, Martin acted against both his advice and his command. He wrapped the poem and mailed it to a magazine, believing that a magazine’s recognition might persuade book publishers to take notice. Yet Martin did not intend to publish it without Brissenden’s permission. His plan was to secure acceptance from a respected magazine first, then use that success to persuade his friend to consent. The decision thus joined Martin’s confidence in publication as a route to recognition with his awareness that the poem was not his to release freely.

The Parthenon’s response arrived while Martin was absorbed in writing Overdue. For five days he had worked in isolation, going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating little. On the sixth morning, a thin letter from the editor told him that the poem had been accepted for the August issue, since the July number was already prepared. The editor reported that the poem had been submitted to Cartwright Bruce, whose favorable opinion helped secure the decision, and asked Martin to send Brissenden’s photograph and biographical information. The magazine offered an honorarium of three hundred and fifty dollars and invited Martin to telegraph if he considered the amount unsatisfactory.

Martin judged the offer too substantial to challenge by telegram, but acceptance did not settle the question of publication: Brissenden’s consent still had to be obtained. Martin also took the decision as evidence that he had been right to believe good writing could find its way into magazines. Bruce’s favorable judgment mattered especially because Martin knew that Brissenden respected him as a critic. The acceptance therefore seemed to promise both payment and authoritative recognition, though Martin’s response was already shadowed by concern for his absent friend.

Publication and Presentation

When Martin later opened the August issue of The Parthenon, he found the poem featured with an elaborate headpiece and decorative margins described as Beardsley-like. Brissenden’s photograph appeared beside that of Sir John Value, the British Ambassador. Before the poem, an editorial note invoked Value’s assertion that America had no poets and presented the publication as The Parthenon’s answer. It also called Bruce the greatest critic in America and cited his judgment that Ephemera was the greatest poem ever written in the country.

The presentation made the poem an instrument in a public argument about American poetry as well as the featured work of an issue. Yet the magazine’s own foreword complicated its declarations of praise: the editors admitted that they had not settled on the poem’s merits and perhaps never would, while describing their repeated attempts to understand its words and arrangement. The bold superlative and the confession of uncertainty sit uneasily together. The poem was advertised as a national achievement even as its publishers presented it as something they could not fully comprehend.

Public Controversy

Ephemera made an immediate hit, but its prominence produced argument rather than consensus. Newspapers filled columns with criticism, jokes, editorials, and readers’ letters debating whether the work qualified as poetry. Helen Della Delmar, promoted in the press as the greatest woman poet in the United States, publicly denied Brissenden a place among poets and wrote at length to argue that he was no poet. The Parthenon used its next issue to congratulate itself for creating a sensation, mock Sir John Value, and exploit Brissenden’s death in its publicity.

The poem’s appearance also prompted imitation, parody, and a widening circle of commentary. A newspaper printed a poem by Delmar that mocked Brissenden, followed by another parody of his work. Other writers and commentators claimed their own relation to the poem: one newspaper repeated a correspondent’s assertion that he had written something similar, only better, while another defended Delmar’s parody by speculating that she might eventually try to write lines like Brissenden’s. Ministers preached against Ephemera, and one minister who defended too much of its content was expelled for heresy. Comic writers and cartoonists made it a subject of laughter, while society-weekly jokes exaggerated its supposed power to provoke violent reactions. The poem circulated widely, but its fame made it available to people who treated it as a provocation, a joke, or an opportunity for self-display.

Martin’s Response and the Poem’s Significance

Martin did not join the laughter, nor did he answer the mockery with anger. He felt sadness. Brissenden had hated the crowd, and Martin now saw the poem’s finest and most sacred qualities placed before that crowd for dissection. The public’s noisy attention did not resemble the recognition Martin had hoped publication would bring. What he had regarded as a victory for good writing instead showed him how a magazine could turn a poem into publicity and invite the public to consume it without understanding it.

That realization also changed how Martin understood his own years of effort. He concluded that Brissenden had been right about the magazines, and that he had spent arduous years learning the same lesson for himself. His metaphor of hitching his wagon to a star only to land in a pestiferous marsh gives the reversal its force: the ideal of artistic achievement remains high, but the institutions that promise to recognize it have brought him into a degraded public spectacle. Ephemera’s publication is therefore both a posthumous success and a bitter defeat of the hopes attached to that success.

When The Parthenon’s three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check was forwarded to Martin, he passed it to the local lawyer handling Brissenden’s affairs for his family. He took a receipt and also gave a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had lent him. The payment thus carried a practical consequence beyond the controversy, while Martin’s response to the poem’s reception remained chiefly one of grief and disillusionment. Ephemera becomes the point at which magazine recognition, commercial exploitation, and the crowd’s fickleness converge—and at which Martin recognizes how little the first guarantees of the second can protect a work from the third.