Robert Clairmont (1902–1971) truly wanted a bohemian life, which not all the would-be artists in 1920s Greenwich Village did. Oh, they all wanted to be known as bohemians, but they lacked dedication. They were dilettantes at what Robert Clairmont worked harder at than any ballerina ever did her craft. And “craft” may be the exact word to use in this context, since Clairmont developed little of his craft.

“The intellect of man,” William Butler Yeats famously wrote, “is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work.” Clairmont would have opened it “the wildness of man,” and he clearly chose to perfect the louche life he lived while occasionally producing poetry. It’s a recipe for a big funeral and little remembrance as a poet in future generations.

As the (often unsourced) story is told, the young Clairmont taught the eccentric Pittsburgh industrialist Sellers McKees Chandler to swim, or possibly saved the man from drowning — and in 1925 received as a result $350,000 in Chandler’s will.

Running as fast as he could to New York, Clairmont supposedly ran the money up into the millions in the pre-Crash stock market, and he became that rarest of creatures: a bohemian with money, which he used for micro-loans (rarely repaid) to his innumerable acquaintances. (He gave the blues great W.C. Handy $5,000, for example, to organize a jazz concert at Carnegie Hall in 1928.)

Along the way, he edited a journal called “New Cow of Greenwich Village” in the 1920s and Pegasus in the 1950s. And he wrote some modernist poetry, often of a found quality, publishing several books. He also wrote “The Answers,” a comic children’s poem that is still sometimes included in anthologies. It’s children’s verse with a little bit of an edge, reminding children that nature doesn’t answer the deepest questions.

The Answers
by Robert Clairmont

“When did the world begin and how?”
I asked a lamb, a goat, a cow: 
“What’s it all about and why?”
I asked a hog as he went by:
“Where will the whole thing end, and when?”
I asked a duck, a goose, a hen:
And I copied all the answers too,
A quack, a honk, and oink, a moo.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.