"A Wine of Wizardry" is a fantasy-horror poem by George Sterling written in 1903 and 1904. When the poem was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1907 with an afterword by Ambrose Bierce it stimulated a nationwide controversy. It was both critically praised and condemned. The poem was reprinted in Sterling's 1908 collection A Wine of Wizardry and Other Poems. It was reprinted again several times, and has been imitated and parodied by many writers, including Sterling himself. The poem inspired Clark Ashton Smith to become a poet and influenced other writers as well.
Creation of the poem Throughout 1903 George Sterling commuted six days a week from his Piedmont home, crossing the San Francisco Bay by ferry to his uncle Frank Havens' San Francisco headquarters to work as a business executive. One December morning Sterling stood outdoors on a ferryboat's deck. He looked down, fascinated by a colorful oil slick on the surface of the water, making patterns and swirling shapes.Upton Sinclair, The Cup of Fury (Great Neck, NY: Channel Press, 1956), p. 73. He could write a poem about that—but not about an unpoetic oil slick. What else could someone gaze into to see visions? He thought of a glass of port wine reflecting a red sunset. His poem would be a fantasy tribute to the power of imagination, a series of red and purple visions linked by a narrator imagining the travels of a winged woman named Fancy (perhaps borrowed from Sterling's hero John Keats' poem "Fancy"). Once Sterling had his idea, "I was only three mornings in writing the new poem, but longer polishing it," he wrote to his mentor Ambrose Bierce.Sterling January 24, 1904 letter to Ambrose Bierce: George Sterling, Dear Master: Letters of George Sterling to Ambrose Bierce, 1900–1912, Roger K. Larson, ed. (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 2002), p. 61.
Sterling sent Bierce a draft of "A Wine of Wizardry" on January 25, 1904.Sterling January 24, 1904 letter to Bierce, Dear Master, p. 61. Bierce was thrilled: "And the poem! I hardly know how to speak of it. No poem in English of equal length has so bewildering a wealth of imagination. Not Spenser himself has flung such a profusion of pearls into so small a casket. Why, man, it takes away the breath!"Bierce February 5, 1904 letter to Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, Letters of Ambrose Bierce, Bertha Clark Pope and George Sterling (uncredited), eds. (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1922; New York: Gordian Press, 1967), p. 86.
When Bierce wrote "so bewildering a wealth of imagination," "bewildering" was an apt word. Sterling wanted "A Wine of Wizardry" to bewilder, to mystify, to exhaust his reader. His lyrics, structured as twenty-nine long run-on sentences, were complex. He crammed into his poem forty obscure euphonious words, more than fifty terms invoking "purple" and "red," twenty-nine mythological creatures, and five astronomical bodies. "A Wine of Wizardry" is a celebration of the overwhelming power of imagination. In the poem, Fancy flies to many places briefly. Sterling's desire to bewilder his reader is demonstrated by his struggle with Bierce over whether or not to make his long poem more clear by simply adding blank lines between Fancy's travels to make each destination distinct. The draft Sterling first sent to Bierce was 149 lines long with only one blank line just before the poem's last part. Bierce painstakingly drew pencil underlines throughout Sterling's draft indicating where Sterling could place twelve more blank lines to increase understandability. Sterling had the poem retyped using Bierce's divisions but then rejected them. He continued to rework his poem, arguing with Bierce for months about blank lines until Sterling finally agreed to add just four more blanks, breaking his long work into six sections.Sterling April 7, 1904 letter to Bierce, Dear Master, p. 68; Bierce April 19, 1904 letter to Sterling, Letters of Ambrose Bierce, pp. 91–92; Sterling April 30, 1904 letter to Bierce, Dear Master, p. 73.
Bierce told Sterling he would try to sell "A Wine of Wizardry" to national magazine editors he knew. The first editors who read the poem rejected it, so Bierce wrote an essay praising Sterling and his poem. He offered editors of magazines "A Wine of Wizardry" bundled with his essay. Even though Bierce had a national reputation, editors still turned it down. Sterling's fantasy poem was too unconventional for editors' tastes. Bierce and Sterling tried for three years to place the poem without result. During those years Sterling continued to refine and expand his fantasy until it grew 207 lines long.
After magazine publication, Sterling slightly revised "A Wine of Wizardry" for book publication, making four punctuation changes, altering four words, and, most noticeably, prefacing his long poem with a three-line quotation from Bierce's poem "Geotheos."A Wine of Wizardry and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1909), pp. 9–20. When Sterling prepared "A Wine of Wizardry" for his 1923 book Selected Poems, he made eleven more revisions, resulting in three slightly different versions of "A Wine of Wizardry."Robert W. Mattila, George Sterling: A Bibliography (Seattle: Book Club of Washington, 2004), section A27.
Structure and synopsis Sterling described "A Wine of Wizardry" to Ambrose Bierce: "You'll notice that it's a 'Study in Scarlet,' so to speak, the 'key note' of the whole thing being given in the first four lines. Of course port suggests crimson, poison, vials, red stars, rubies, etc."Sterling January 24, 1904 letter to Bierce, Dear Master, p. 61. Sterling said his poem was a procession of pictures, once calling it "that series of red magic-lantern slides."[Theodore Bonnet], "The Spectator," Town Talk n. 786 (September 21, 1907), pp. 11–14. He wrote his poem with a simple, pounding iambic pentameter rhythm. (A century later that rhythm propels rap and hip hop beats.)
The summary below is based on the text of Sterling's 1923 final version in Selected Poems. Spaces between paragraphs show where Sterling placed blank lines to divide his poem.
"A Wine of Wizardry" begins with an unnamed narrator facing west to watch a crimson sunset redden sea-waves crashing on rocks. He pours port wine "Into a crystal cup" but does not yet drink. Instead the narrator stares at his wine and wineglass as if they were a fortune-teller's crystal ball. He envisions a winged woman named Fancy flying to beautiful places and horrifying sites, all imagined as red from seeing them in the dark wine and the sunset-reflecting wineglass. First Fancy flies to a beach where maidens dodge waves or search for sea-moss and seashells. Then Fancy goes to a red grotto with "wattled monsters" and a "magician peering on the dammed". Next Fancy goes to an iceberg beneath the northern lights, "where arctic elves have hidden wintry gems". Looking for warmth, Fancy travels to stars in space.
Then she visits a garden near shadowy towers and a forest where fairies dance for elves. Fancy leaves for a "Syrian treasure-house," then follows "the seaward flight of homing dragons" "To some red city of the Djinns" where silent palaces with "a porphyry crypt" make her flee South. There "crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes" plan to extinguish the red star Aldebaran. The gnomes live in a cavern "Above a wicked queen's unhallowed tomb." Inside her tomb, statues of monsters hold globes, rubies glow, tree roots thrust into marble, and royal helmets rust. Outside, cypress trees reflect the sun's ghostly red, a flying bat sees "the twilight witch", and the king of "silent ghouls" excavates black relics. Frightened, Fancy flies to a narrow strip of land projecting from a western coast into the sea. Underwater she finds colorful coral and rocks. On orange sand, bronze-prowed galleys with sailors from far shores stare at the setting sun as if it was a red lighthouse beacon. Waves wash over the ships' decks "And crimson bubbles rise from battle-wrecks." Luminous polyps swim to glowing underwater caves.
Fancy follows the red star Antares in the constellation Scorpio to an island with temples, where she smiles at priestesses in purple robes holding garnets up to the sun or shouting "a mystic word" to the red star Betelgeuse. She flies to groves of trees where a cathedral wall is draped with hyacinth flowers. Inside the dark cathedral, before Faith returns, Fancy kneels to quietly commemorate the day. She leaves to watch a mountain with broken tombs. She knows Circe and her poisons are there, and sees Circe brew potions, torture a victim, and smile, until "shapes of men that were / Point, weeping, at tremendous dooms to be."
Fancy flees again, this time to caverns where Satan fondles a flayed victim before Lilith "leads from Hell his whitest queens" wearing only chains heated red-hot. The queens dance in pain. Fancy leaves for a place where "powers of wizardry" search for objects and "A sick enchantress" curses the stars.
Fancy flees to India's river Ganges and a temple of Siva lit with funeral pyres. She leaves Asia and travels to halls where "dead Merlin's prowling ape has spilt" a vial of scarlet venom. A spell invokes a phantom who cries and makes an owl sad. The goddess Hecate speaks a menacing spell. Fancy sees a blue-eyed vampire smile in front of the crater-pocked moon, which reminds the narrator of leprosy sores.
Fancy folds her wings and flees to a star visible above the last fadeout of sunset. Sterling's narrator looks "the way she went". Returned from imagination to the real world, the narrator, in the poem's final line, at last drinks from his wineglass. He smiles.
Magazine publication In April 1907 the New York Times and the Washington Post printed a lengthy interview with the new British ambassador, James Bryce."The Demand for Dramatic Genius Was Never Before So Great, Yet We Have No Great Dramatist, Says Ambassador James Bryce," Washington Post (April 28, 1907), magazine section, p. 3; "Bryce Talks of Art: British Ambassador Declares Age Needs Great Poets," Washington Post (April 29, 1907), p. 2; "Our Need Is Poets, Says James Bryce," New York Times (April 29, 1907), pp. 1–2. The news media focused on Bryce's remark that America lacked great poets. The story was reprinted by other newspapers, and Bryce's remark was reported and mocked in newspapers and magazines across the nation. Ambrose Bierce wrote a monthly column in William Randolph Hearst's magazine Cosmopolitan. In May, Cosmopolitans new editor Samuel Selwyn Chamberlain noticed that Bierce's column mentioned Ambassador Bryce: "Mr. Bryce, the venerable British ambassador, is pleased to lament the fact that America has no great poets. Mr. Bryce has the distinction to be ignorant, or he is inaccessible to poetry. In Mr. George Sterling and Mr. William Vaughn Moody we have two young poets of a high order of genius who have 'arrived,' and others are on the way. ... In 'The Testimony of the Suns' Mr. Sterling strikes and holds as high a note as has been heard in a century of English song, and I have a manuscript poem by him which would add to the glory of Coleridge or Keats."Ambrose Bierce, "Small Contributions: The Writers Written," submitted in May to be printed in Cosmopolitan Magazine (August 1907) v. 63 n. 4, p. 461.
Chamberlain asked Bierce to see Sterling's "manuscript poem", so Bierce sent him "A Wine of Wizardry." In June 1907, Chamberlain told Bierce he would publish "A Wine of Wizardry" and Bierce's companion essay, "A Poet and His Poem" in Cosmopolitan.Sterling letters to Bierce June 10 and June 19, 1907, Dear Master, p. 136, p. 138.