The posthumous publication of Brissenden’s Ephemera becomes a public controversy that exposes the gulf between a poem’s artistic life and the literary marketplace’s appetite for spectacle. The Parthenon presents the dead poet as both a cultural sensation and a commercial opportunity; the ensuing praise, denunciation, parody, and jokes turn his work into a public object over which almost anyone claims authority. For Martin Eden, the uproar confirms Brissenden’s judgment of the magazines, but its most consequential effect is private: Martin destroys eleven other poems his friend had entrusted to him.

The poem appears in The Parthenon

Martin encounters the news while withdrawn and inert. After Maria brings him soup, he sits on the edge of the bed, barely seeing his surroundings, until the unopened wrapper of a magazine from the morning’s mail catches his attention. He recognizes the August issue of The Parthenon and remembers that it should contain Ephemera. The arrival of the magazine interrupts his blankness with a sudden, painful awareness of Brissenden’s absence: Martin wishes his friend were there to see the publication.

The poem has been given a conspicuous presentation, with a lavish headpiece and decorative margins in a Beardsley-like style. Brissenden’s photograph appears on one side of the headpiece and Sir John Value’s on the other. The editorial framing makes the poem part of a public argument before readers reach the work itself. Sir John Value is invoked for his assertion that America has no poets; The Parthenon presents its publication of Ephemera as an answer to that claim. Cartwright Bruce, identified as the country’s greatest critic, is cited in praise of the poem as the greatest ever written in America.

That confidence is complicated by the editor’s own foreword. The editors say they have not yet decided what they think of Ephemera and may never do so; they describe rereading it and wondering both where Brissenden found its words and how he joined them together. The note thus advertises the poem through praise and uncertainty at once. Its elaborate display promises a cultural event, while the editors’ professed bewilderment makes the poem’s construction itself part of the attraction. The poem follows the foreword, placed before a readership already primed to argue over its value.

Private grief and the poems Martin destroys

Martin’s response to the magazine is not the vindication the editors’ presentation might invite. He murmurs that it is a good thing Brissenden died, then lets the magazine fall between his knees to the floor. The remark carries grief as well as bitterness: Martin believes Brissenden would not have forgiven him for allowing the poem to reach this audience. The publication has made the dead man’s work visible, but it has also exposed that work to the public judgment and commercial handling Brissenden despised.

The sensation around Ephemera soon deepens Martin’s unease. He finds the presentation cheap and vulgar, yet notices that he is too apathetic even to feel much nausea. He cannot summon anger; his response is numbness. He understands the poem’s treatment as consistent with everything Brissenden condemned in bourgeois society, but that recognition offers no release. Martin’s grief for his friend and the collapse of his own world have left the literary controversy feeling small beside a more fundamental loss.

Then Martin retrieves a box that once held typewriter paper. Among its contents are eleven poems written by Brissenden. He tears each lengthwise and crosswise and drops the pieces into the wastebasket. The action is deliberate but languid, without the force of a public protest or an attempt to rescue the poems by preserving them. Once he has finished, he sits again on the bed and stares blankly ahead. The destruction makes the controversy intimate: Martin cannot control what has happened to the published poem, but he can prevent the other manuscripts in his possession from entering the same public arena.

A sensation made from praise and ridicule

The public response grows well beyond the magazine. Martin later scans newspapers and magazines to see how Ephemera is being treated. It has become a hit, but the hit consists largely of argument about whether it is poetry at all. Local papers run columns of criticism, facetious editorials, and serious letters from subscribers. The poem’s disputed status becomes a continuing subject for commentary rather than a settled judgment of its artistic merits.

Helen Della Delmar, introduced with extravagant publicity as the greatest woman poet in the United States, denies Brissenden a place beside her on Pegasus and writes lengthy letters arguing that he is no poet. The Parthenon uses its next issue to congratulate itself for causing a stir, mock Sir John Value, and exploit Brissenden’s death. A newspaper claiming a circulation of half a million publishes an original poem by Helen Della Delmar that ridicules Brissenden, followed by a parody of his work. The competing gestures of celebration and disparagement all keep the poem in circulation, while the dead poet becomes the subject of promotion as well as criticism.

The controversy also produces a cascade of claims by people who want a share of the attention. One paper reports a correspondent who says he had written a similar poem earlier, only better. Another rebukes Helen Della Delmar for her parody, treating her mockery as disrespect toward a great poet, perhaps the greatest, while speculating that she may herself someday attempt lines like his. The disagreement does not merely divide readers into admirers and opponents; it generates further commentary about who has the authority to judge, imitate, or ridicule the poem.

Religious and comic responses make the public spectacle still broader. Ministers preach sermons against Ephemera, and one minister who supports too much of its content is expelled for heresy. Comic verse writers and cartoonists take it up, while society weeklies circulate jokes that exaggerate the poem’s supposed power to drive readers to violence or suicide. The range of response—from theological condemnation to newspaper parody—shows how thoroughly the work has been detached from its author and converted into material for public use.

Martin’s judgment and the aftermath

Martin does not laugh at the jokes or grit his teeth in anger. He feels sadness. In the wreckage of his own life, where love had stood at the highest point, the commotion of the magazines and the public is a lesser collapse. Yet the episode sharpens a judgment he has reached at personal cost: Brissenden was right about the magazines, and Martin spent arduous, futile years discovering that the literary marketplace was as bad as his friend had said, if not worse. The poem’s reception offers no simple triumph. Publication brings attention, but the attention is inseparable from opportunism, noisy dispute, and ridicule.

Martin’s dwindling response to the uproar accompanies his withdrawal from work and social life. He writes nothing, closes his books, and waits without knowing what might restart his life. Although Ephemera has made a hit, fame for Brissenden’s poem does not restore Martin’s belief in the world that circulates it. Instead, thoughts of Tahiti and the South Seas return more often, while the controversy strengthens his sense that he is finished with the literary path he once pursued.

The Parthenon eventually sends a check for three hundred and fifty dollars. Martin turns it over to the local lawyer handling Brissenden’s affairs for his family, takes a receipt, and gives a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had lent him. This practical settlement follows the spectacle of the poem’s reception without resolving Martin’s grief. The money is accounted for; the remaining poems have been destroyed; and the public debate continues at a distance from the friend whose work it has made famous.