All of the calculated activities for the promotion of the stage during the last few years in America have as yet been limited and indirect in their results. Among them it is very possible that there was a blazing of the way for another development of great importance which has taken place without any leagues or schools or organized propaganda. This has been the restoration of poetry as a living language. Not only have authors’ readings taken the place of dramatic interpretations in the lecture market but the audiences who flock to hear Tagore and Noyes and Masefield and Gibson and Bynner and Lindsay and Frost go to listen to poems with which they are already familiar and to get that sense of personal acquaintance with poets which ten years ago they coveted with playwrights and, further back, with novelists. The dominant fact about the contemporary reading public is its reawakened zest for poetry.

In 1890 the English poetry-reading world was chiefly conscious of the passing of its leading singers for the last half century. It was a period when they were recalling Emerson’s “Terminus” and Longfellow’s “Ultima Thule,” Whitman’s “November Boughs” and Whittier’s “A Lifetime,” Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” and Browning’s “Asolando.” There was no group in the prime of life who were adequate successors to this greater choir. Stedman, Aldrich, and Stoddard had courted the muse as a kind of alien divinity and enjoyed excursions into the distant land of her dwelling-place. But their poetry was a poetry of accomplishment; an embellishment of life, and not an integral part of it (see pp. 324–326). It was a period when people were tempted with some reason to dwell on the “good old days,” and for a while it seemed as though it would be long before the world would see their like again.

The spirit of the times seemed to be expressed by a group of younger artists who were in conscious revolt against Victorian literature and rather noisily assertive on their favorite theme of art for art’s sake. They were occupied in composing intricate and ingenious poems. They were engrossed like Masters’s “Petit, the Poet” in inditing

Some of them did pastels in prose, and many edited transitory little periodicals like The Yellow Book, The Chap Book, The Lark, and Truth in Boston. Fourteen of these came into existence in the United States in the first two months of 1897, and almost none of them survived till the Fourth of July of that year. Probably the only lines in any of them recalled by the readers of to-day are Gelett Burgess’s quatrain on the purple cow. The burden of these young poets was many words fairly spoken of “organic growth,” “development,” “progress,” “liberalism,” “freedom of speech,” and “independent thought”; and the chief product of their thinking was a frank and free Bohemianism, an honest unconventionality much more real than the diluted thing about which Stedman and Aldrich had rimed thirty years before.

The most vigorous and enduring of the new group was Richard Hovey (1864–1900). He was Western-born, schooled at Washington, and a graduate of Dartmouth in 1885. His next years included study in the General Theological Seminary in New York, an assistantship in a New York ritualistic church, excursions into journalism and acting, and then, after some years as poet and dramatist, a professorship of English literature in Barnard College, Columbia University. Hovey grew perceptibly during his eager enjoyment of these various pursuits. For a while he seemed content to sing the praises of convivial comradeship:

but he passed before long to the stage in which the good fellowship of youth was a symbol of something far larger than itself—nothing less than the promise of humankind. The ode delivered before his fraternity convention in 1896 quite transcends the sort of effusion usually evoked by such occasions. The spring in the air, in the world, and in the heart of youth culminate in the oft-sung “Stein Song”; and after it the poem goes on to “The first low stirring of that greater spring,”

This potent something is the “unceasing purpose” of Tennyson, but with a difference, for in Hovey’s mind it is not the purpose of a detached God who imposes his will benevolently on mankind from without, but the creative impulse which is inherent in life itself, the evidence of the divine spirit in the heart of man. Comradeship, then, became to Hovey a symbol of altruism, and he looked beyond this springtide of the year and of the youthful collegians to the time when science, art, and religion should emancipate men in the truth that should set them free and bring them, in spite of delays, in the fullness of time to “the greater to-morrow.”

Yet while Hovey was uplifted by the fine fervor of such a faith, he experienced a reaction with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. In the sudden self-righteousness of an inflamed patriotism he nationalized God and deified war. Excited beyond measure by the immediate issue, he not only justified America against Spain but, forgetting all the lessons of evolution, he declared that the race could develop only through the repetition of old experiences.

His mistake lay in justifying all wars in order to justify the national altruism of the war with Spain, and his fallacy came in his assumption that biological and physical life were governed by the same laws. For the moment Hovey turned “jingo,” as most of his countrymen did, yet even then he invoked the sword for the suppression of tyranny and not in the name of nationalistic ambition.

The home of Hovey’s imagination was where the true poet’s always is—“far in the vast of sky, ... too high for sound of strife, or any violation of the town.” From this high vantage point he sang the glories of the things he loved the best, but with maturity he moved from the world of material pleasure to the realms of spiritual adventure. In 1893 he wrote

Five years later he could no longer catalogue his places on the map, for his goal was “the unknown” and “the wilderness” in pursuit of the high human adventure which Moody was to celebrate in his “Road Hymn for the Start.” In a parallel way Hovey’s first conception of fellowship rose from the early relish for beer and song to the fellowship of kindred souls of which the fine flowering is the love of man and woman.

At the age of thirty-six, just on the threshold of maturity, Hovey died.

William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910) was another son of the Middle West. Born in southern Indiana, he lost his mother in his fifteenth year and his father, a river-steamboat captain, in his seventeenth. By alternate study and teaching he prepared himself for Harvard, and entering at somewhat more than the average age he completed his college work in three years and followed these with a year in Europe as private tutor. In addition to a receptiveness for learning he had the capacity for a rich and varied culture which is sometimes mistakenly thought to belong only to blue-blooded inheritors of family tradition. From the close of his residence in Cambridge till his death, seventeen years later, Moody’s life included long and extended travels, varied and profound study, eight years’ teaching at the University of Chicago, from which President Harper was reluctant to accept his resignation, and distinguished work as painter, poet, and dramatist. Suddenly stricken with a fatal illness, he died in 1910.

Mention has already been made of his work as playwright (see pp. 445, 446). His lyric and narrative poems all have the same breadth of view which is inherent in his poetic dramas. He was familiar with a wide range of the world’s art and literature, but in the work which he chose to collect for republication he was imitative of none. His imagination roved freely through all time and space. “Gloucester Moors” were the vantage point from which he conceived the earth as a “vast, outbound ship of souls”; “Old Pourquoi” challenged the scheme of creation from beneath the Norman sky; “The Death of Eve” is derived from the Hebrew past, “The Masque of Judgment” from the Greek, “A Dialogue in Purgatory” from the Italian, “The Fountain” from early American legend, “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” from a current event. Thus he did not maintain his citizenship of the world by any denial of allegiance to America. In the third section of “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” he sketched as splendid a pageant of America as has ever been devised. The Cape Ann children seeking the arbutus, the hill lads of Tennessee harking to the wild geese on their northern flight, are one with the youth of Chicago, the renewing green of the wheat fields, the unrolling of the rivers from the white Sierras, the downward creep of Alaskan glaciers, and the perennial palm-crown of Hawaii. It is in very truth

Moody’s love of America did not lead him to embrace the “manifest destiny” illusion. He was quite as conscious of the misdirection of human leadership as he was of the riches with which God had endowed the natural land. “Gloucester Moors” is deeply solicitous for a future which seems to be insured for the grasping capitalist; “The Brute” is both more vigorous and more hopeful in its certitude that the factory system in its worst forms is a short-lived social abortion. The demon of the machine is sure to be caught and subdued:

These poems were of life within America or without it, but in “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” and “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” Moody warned the rulers in Washington that the country, now awake to its duties in the world, would forgive blindness, but baseness it would smite. Finally, in “The Quarry” he cried out in pride at America’s fine part in preventing the partitioning of helpless China by the grasping European empires,—the achievement of the poet-diplomat, John Hay.

Throughout all Moody’s work is a constant undercurrent of evolutionary thought—not the brutal mechanism associated with the term “Darwinism,” but the aspiring impulse within all life which makes it rise not through struggle against outer forces so much as through the innate impulse to develop. In the sardonic “Menagerie” the idea is ironically stated:

which is no less than the existence of souls:

and these souls are expressions of the universal soul which finds its own salvation in unceasing “groping, testing, passing on,”—the creative struggle described by Raphael in “The Masque of Judgment” as

In his attitude toward and his literary treatment of woman Moody was emphatically modern. He was far beyond the supercilious and hollow amenities with which eighteenth-century poetry was filled, and he was not satisfied with the sincerer expression of deep personal tributes to individual women. In his philosophy woman was the dominant influence in the development of humankind. Eve and Prometheus were one in seeking the knowledge and power to lift man above brute creation and in producing the clash between God and man which was the price of knowledge and the cost of progress. But Prometheus was a poor and defeated character in comparison; for Moody, in Eve and Pandora, presented woman not only as the donor and the fulfillment of love but as the final agent of reconciliation between the human and the divine. In the various poems there are acknowledgments of awe, of reverence, of spiritual love, and of passion; taken together they show the same breadth of view that belongs to the human equation in which Moody regards woman as the greatest factor. It is most significant that the dramatic trilogy was planned to conclude with a song of Eve, and that twice—in “I am the Woman” and part five of “The Death of Eve”—Moody composed studies toward that final song that was never perfected. Both progress through the ages when woman was subtly molded by man’s conception of her, so that her happiness and her very being consisted in conforming herself to him.

And in both she appears as the indomitable Promethean spirit who in the end was to fulfill that plan which in the beginning she had endangered. There is no reference to any woman in any of Moody’s poems which is out of harmony with this dominating and progressive idea.

For several reasons Moody’s poetry is not easy to read and is therefore undestined to wide popularity (see pp. 263, 264). He was not interested to compose simple lyrics or narratives. Seldom does he aid the reader by means of even an implied narrative thread. The poems inspired by history are not self-explanatory nor accompanied by footnotes. Moody consistently employed events, whether actual or imagined, as mere avenues of approach to emotional and spiritual experiences, and he expected the reader to contribute to the poems from his own resourceful imagination. It is because the whole meaning is not laid out on the surface of his verses—like Christmas-card sentiments—that Moody has become very largely a poet’s poet. Their instinctive grasp of the figurative deeper meanings, their immediate response to elusive metaphor, and their understanding of his vigorous, exact, but sometimes recondite diction make them his best audience. For they too can most nearly appreciate the distinguished beauties of his work—his wide and intimate knowledge of world literature, the opulence of his style, the firmness of his structure, the scrupulousness of his detail. Through the rising and the risen poets of the present generation Moody’s influence is exerted on thousands who are all unconscious of it.

An approach to contemporary American poetry in a fraction of a chapter at the end of a general history can be justified on only one ground: it serves the purpose of a guideboard on a transcontinental highway. American literature was not concluded with the deaths of the great New England group nor has it come to an end since then. The student should recognize this in his respect for the fine promise of what is now being written, and he should recognize that the study of our past literature can bear no richer fruit than a sane understanding of the literature of the day. Furthermore he should be intelligent enough to see that literature need not be old to be fit for study—that it is not only absurd but vicious to assume (as used to be said, with a difference, of the Indian) that there is no good poet but a dead poet. These few pages are therefore devoted to a half-dozen writers who represent tendencies. They are arbitrarily selected as the contemporary dramatists in the preceding chapter were. Yet their weight is greatly reËnforced by the many others to whom no allusion can be made. A comparison of the three books on recent American poetry suggests the speed of the literary current. Miss Rittenhouse’s “The Younger American Poets” (1904) includes eighteen poets of whom thirteen were born before 1865. Miss Lowell’s “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry” (1917) includes six poets, none of whom were mentioned in the earlier book, and the oldest of whom was born in the closing days of 1869. Of the sixteen poets indicated by name in the chapter headings of Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s “New Era in American Poetry” (1919), only three were born before 1875.

The reading of contemporary poetry should be done with zest and without calculation, but the study of the same material must be approached with self-conscious deliberateness and with a definite resolve not to be carried away by the cheap and easy generalizations current on the lips of the careless talker. Contemporary poetry is not all of one kind nor is it chiefly characterized by defiant revolt against old forms and old ideas. It is true that in all branches of artistic endeavor new methods and new points of view are being advanced. In music Debussy and Schoenberg, in painting CÉzanne and Matisse, in sculpture Rodin and his disciples, in stage setting and costuming Gordon Craig and Leon Bakst, have shocked and surprised quite as many as they have edified, and have given rise to the same sort of querulous protest indulged in by those who talk as if all modern poetry were typified by the most extravagant verses of Alfred Kreymborg, or “Anne Knish.” But in poetry most of the recent work has not been wantonly bizarre, most of the more distinguished verse has not been “free,” and most of the men and women who have written free verse have shown and have practiced a firm mastery of the established forms. The point, then, is to maintain an open mind and to make sure of conclusions before adopting them, and the surest method of doing these two student-like things is to read and study authors by the bookful and not by the pseudo-royal road of anthologies and eclectic magazines. If you want to become acquainted with a man you will sit down at leisure with him in his study, instead of forming snapshot judgments from contact at afternoon teas, and you will form your own opinion in preference to gleaning it from the conversation of others.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869- ), the oldest of this latter group, was born in the same year with Moody and is now in the prime of life. The Tilbury of many of his poems is really the town of his upbringing—Gardiner, Maine. It is an unusual but not a unique village in America—a colonial old-world village. The atmosphere of Puritanism had not been blown away from it, and it still felt the subtle influence of a preËminent family. When “the squire” passed,

It is easy to think of Tilbury as an English town; it is utterly different from Lindsay’s Springfield or Masters’s Spoon River. It is not without significance that the clearest single picture presents a little boy of twelve as the companion of “Isaac and Archibald,” two old men on the ominous verge of superannuation. It was life in Gardiner that gives so real a sense of the town on the Avon in “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.” In 1891 Mr. Robinson entered Harvard, withdrawing at the end of two years and entering business in New York City. Here he remained till 1910, the last five years as an appointee of President Roosevelt in the New York Customhouse, and since the latter date he has lived again in Gardiner, bearing some resemblance in his mellowed maturity, perhaps, to Larry Scammon in his play “The Porcupine.”

As a matter of literary history the most striking fact about Mr. Robinson is that the poetry-reading public has been redeveloped since he began to write. Although his first volume, “The Children of the Night,” appeared in 1897, and his second, “Captain Craig,” in 1902, it was possible for him to be omitted from “The Younger American Poets” of 1904. With “The Town down the River” in 1910 his recognition began to come, and with the republication of “Captain Craig” the public became aware of a volume which they could have been reading for full thirteen years.

Miss Lowell displays a mild contempt for the title poem of this book, and Mr. Phelps—in his “Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century”—echoes her verdict. Yet for many readers there is a splendor in it and a richness that brings them back to it again and again. It is doubtless long, discursive, and condensible. In fact it is already condensed in such a bit as “Flammonde.” It is an elaboration of the title lyric for “The Children of the Night”; but only a wanton perversion of criticism will discount a philosophical poem for not submitting to lyric standards. It is a poem of childhood, sunlight, laughter, and hope declaimed by an indomitable old vagabond of eternity who is invincible in death and is fittingly borne to the grave while the trombones of the Tilbury band blare the Dead March in “Saul.” Captain Craig is a character who would not be his complete self without his verbosity. His type, in fact, is never succinct. They are extravagant of time, of gesture, of vocal and rhetorical emphasis, of words themselves. Out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths speak all sorts of irresponsible, whimsical, exalted, and splendid extravagance. They give voice to the dumb, and they amuse and stimulate the good listeners, but they bore the cleverly communicative, who dislike any consecutive talk but their own. Thus, for example, the captain writes on one May day:

Captain Craig, in a word, is self-expression in very being and condemns in joyous scorn the man who believes that life is best fulfilled through discipline and renunciation. Instead he offers something positive:

This is the note throughout all Robinson’s poems and plays. His disbelief in negativism leads him often to be impatient and caustic and leads the cloudy minded to timid deprecation of his cynicism, not knowing the difference between this and irony; but Mr. Robinson is never cynical toward the things that are more excellent. He is only convinced that people’s Puritan convictions as to what is more excellent result in a perverted estimate; he is only attempting to substitute light for shadow, laughter for gloom; he is only saying with Larry Scammon:

As a craftsman Mr. Robinson has won distinction by his simple, direct realism. He employs for the most part the old iambic measures, a sentence structure which is often conversational, and a diction which is severe in its restraint. There are few “purple patches” in his poetry, but there are many clear flashes of incisive phrasing. His work is like a May day in his own seacoast town—not balmy, but bracing, with lots of sparkle on the blue, and the taste of the east wind through it all.

Robert Frost (1875- ) is known as the author of three books of verse: “A Boy’s Will,” 1913, “North of Boston,” 1914, and “Mountain Interval,” 1916. He is known also—and rightly—as the voice and embodiment of rural New England. Yet he was born in San Francisco, his mother was born in Edinburgh, he first came to New England at the age of ten, and he lived for the next eight schoolboy years in a mill town, Lawrence, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, in his capacity for receiving impressions, he seemed to have a selective memory which made him sensitive to the aspects of country life in the regions north of Boston—the regions trod by nine generations of forbears on his father’s side of the family. And so it was that though his first two volumes were published in London, there is no local trace of the old country in them, nothing in them that he had not known in farm or village between 1885 and 1912, when he set sail with his wife and children toward a residence of two and a half years in England. On his return to America he bought a farm in New Hampshire. Since 1916 he has taught in Amherst College.

The common statement that Mr. Frost is content solely to present the appearances of New England life should be given distinct qualifications in two respects: the first is that his earliest book, “A Boy’s Will,” is wholly subjective and analytical, completely falling outside the generalization. And the second is that while “North of Boston” and “Mountain Interval” are objective pictures of New England life, the truth in them is by no means limited to New England, but is pertinent to human kind, although deeply tinged with the hue of that particular district. “A Boy’s Will,” a little volume, is made up of thirty-two lyrics, each of them complete and most of them lovely. They are not, however, detached, although it is an open question how many readers would see their relationship if this were not indicated in the table of contents. It is the record of a young artist’s experience who marries, withdraws to the country, revels in the isolation of winter, in the coming of spring, and in the farm beauties of summer. This isolation, however, cannot satisfy him long. Let the contents for Part Two show what happens: “‘Revelation’—He resolves to become intelligible, at least to himself, since there is no help else—‘The Trial by Existence’—and to know definitely what he thinks about the soul; ‘In Equal Sacrifice’—about love; ‘The Tuft of Flowers’—about fellowship; ‘Spoils of the Dead’—about death; ‘Pan with Us’—about art (his own); ‘The Demiurge’s Laugh’—about science.” With the five lyrics of Part Three, the youth and his bride return to the world with misgivings:

This book does not represent the work of Frost as it appears in his later volumes, but it does represent the poet himself:

The second volume, “North of Boston,” is twice as long as “A Boy’s Will” and contains half as many titles. There would be nothing in this mathematical formula if it did not carry with it a real difference in content. But this second book is made up not of lyrics, but of unimpassioned vignettes of New England life. This is the grim New England which the poet attempted to shut out in “Love and a Question”:

The book presents the death of a farm laborer, the maddened bereavement of a mother whose child is buried within sight of the house, the black prospect faced by a household drudge who faces the insanity which is an inherited blight in her blood. They are not amiable pictures, and they offer neither problem nor solution, only the life itself. They are not, however, all equally grim. “The Mountain” tells of a township of sixty voters with only a fringe of level land around the looming pile. It dominates life, limits it, and rises above it, for few have either time or curiosity to reach the top. “The Black Cottage” presents a widowed relict of the Civil War who knew only her sacrifice and whose unthinking orthodoxy was as hazy as her political creed. With liberalism in the parish, the preacher was inclined to omit “descended into Hades” from the ritual:

Of another sort are the poems which have most of outdoor in them: “Mending Wall,” the symbol of barriers between properties which the winters throw down; “Blueberries,” which indicates the complex of ownership in a countryside filled with nature’s gifts of uncultivated fruit; “After Apple Picking,” the weariness forced upon the farmer in his effort to husband an embarrassment of orchard riches; and “The Woodpile” with its suggestion of the slow processes of nature contrasted with the temporal efforts of man. The woodpile is discovered far out in a swamp, long abandoned and vine-covered:

The last volume, “Mountain Interval,” is something of a composite, with elements in both the former two. One reads Mr. Frost’s pages thoughtfully and leaves them in a thoughtful mood. Not all are grim, but very few are gay. They have the rock-ribbed austerity of the country from which they spring and some of its beauty, too. They are suffused with the smoky haze of an Indian-summer day.

Edgar Lee Masters (1869- ) was born in Kansas in the same year with Moody and Robinson. In the next year his family moved to Illinois, which is his real “native” state. As a boy he had wide opportunities for reading. At the age of twenty-one he entered Knox College and plunged with zest into the study of the classics, but was forced to withdraw at the end of the year because Mr. Masters, Sr., would acknowledge no value in these studies for the practice of law, toward which he was directing his son. After a brief experiment in independence the young man surrendered and eventually entered on a successful career as a Chicago attorney. Yet the law did not take complete possession of him; he has always been a devoted reader of Greek literature. “Songs and Satires,” published in 1916, contains a few lyrics from a volume of 1898 which was printed, but through an accident of the trade never published. One of these ends with the significant stanza:

Mr. Masters’s next venture was a poetic drama in 1900, “Maximilian,” a tragedy in verse which was accorded a few sympathetic reviews but no wide reading. Other works followed in the next fifteen years, some in law and some in literature. And finally, in 1915, appeared the “Spoon River Anthology.” This is in all probability the most widely circulated book of new poems in the history of American literature; others may have achieved a greater total of copies during a long career, but it is doubtful whether any others have equaled fifty thousand within three years of publication.

The most valuable single utterance on this much-discussed work is the richly compacted preface of Mr. Masters in “Toward the Gulf,” with its inscription to William Marion Reedy. Mr. Masters had submitted various contributions to Reedy’s Mirror, but had received most of them back with friendly appeals for something fresh. The first five Spoon River epitaphs were written almost casually in answer to this repeated challenge. At the same time they were a more than casual application of a hint from the Greek: a “resuscitation of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic,” assembled into an ultimate collection of nearly two hundred and fifty brief units, each a self-inscribed epitaph by one of the Spoon River townsfolk. These represent the chief types in an American country town and recognize in particular the usual line of cleavage between those who choose to be considered virtuous and those who do not care what they are considered. Unfortunately the first of these classes includes both the idealist and the hypocrite; and the second, both the conscious radical and the confirmed reprobate. A typical issue which might arise in such a town, as well as a typical alignment of forces, is described in “The Spooniad,” the closing mock-heroic fragment and the longest unit in the book.

The “Anthology” has been violently assailed as a wantonly cynical production, each assault on this ground carrying within itself a proof that the censor either had not read the book through or did not understand it. As a matter of fact the most impressive element in the book and the one which bulks largest in the last quarter of it are the victorious idealists. There is Davis Matlock, who decided to live life out like a god, sure of immortality. There is Tennessee Claflin Shope, who asserted the sovereignty of his own soul, and Samuel Gardiner, who determined to live largely in token of his ample spirit, and the Village Atheist, who knew that only those who strive mightily could possess eternal life, and Lydia Humphrey, who in her church found the vision of the poets. In spite of the protests of readers who were so disgusted with the Inferno of the earlier portion that they never progressed to the concluding Paradiso, the book achieved its great circulation among a tolerant public and enviable applause from the most discriminating critics.

“Spoon River” established Mr. Masters’s reputation and prepared the public for further thrills and shocks in the volumes to follow. This expectation has been only half fulfilled. The certainty of a public hearing has naturally encouraged the poet to more rapid production, but the subsequent books—“Songs and Satires” and “The Great Valley” of 1916 and “Toward the Gulf” of 1918—have been divided both in tone and content between the caustic informality for which Mr. Masters was known in his earlier work and the classic finish which is a return to his unknown, earliest style.

In his treatment of sex, however, Mr. Masters has supplied the shocks and thrills expected, dealing with various aspects of passion with a frank minuteness which is sometimes distasteful and sometimes morbid. Unusually his discussions of passion are more analytical than picturesque. He assumes its existence as a dominant factor in life and discusses not the experience itself so much as its influence. Frequently whole poems are concerned with it. He takes for granted passionate love without benefit of clergy, recording it without either idealizing it or defending it. Doubtless life has included the material for the “Dialogue at Perko’s,” for “Victor Rafolski on Art,” and for “Widow La Rue,” and certainly modern poetry supplies parallels in the works of other men. In a more significant way the sex psychology of Freud crops out in many poems not ostensibly devoted to it, as, for example, in “To-morrow is my Birthday.” This soliloquy attributed to Shakespeare in his tercentenary year stands in striking contrast to Mr. Robinson’s “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.” In these two poems (of about four hundred lines each) Mr. Robinson writes in the manner of Ben Jonson, paying his tribute to Shakespeare at the height of his powers in London, touching on his susceptibility to women but passing this to dilate on his almost superhuman wisdom; Mr. Masters devotes the last two thirds of Shakespeare’s monologue on the night of his last carousal to sex confessions which become increasingly gross as the bard becomes increasingly drunk. Mr. Robinson’s passage is only a few lines in length and concludes:

Mr. Masters’s approaches two hundred and fifty lines, begins with “The thing is sex,” continues with

and ends with common brothel profanity. The popular method of justifying the Masters treatment is to gibe at the Robinson reticence as Puritan prudishness, but it is a gibe which for many enforces the value of reticence even in modern art.

So much for the negative side of Mr. Masters’s work—the so-called cynicism declaimed at by the inattentive reader and the preoccupation with sex which is fairly open to criticism. On the positive side the greater weight of his work lies in poems of searching analysis. “So We Grew Together” is the changing relations of an adopted son for his Bohemian father; “Excluded Middle,” an inquiry into the mystery of inheritance; “Dr. Scudder’s Clinical Lecture,” the study of a paranoiac—dramatic monologues suggestive of Browning in execution as well as content. The reader of Mr. Masters as a whole is bound to discover in the end that all these analyses are searchings into the mystery of life. It appears in “The Loom” as it does in “The Cry”:

And he is bound to confess that Mr. Masters, instead of being a cynic, is a sober optimist. Take the last lines of the opening and closing poems in “Toward the Gulf”:

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879- ), born in Springfield, Illinois, of which he is the most devoted and distinguished citizen since Lincoln, studied for three years at Hiram College and then for five years as an art student in Chicago and New York. Unfortunately his drawings are accessible only in a quarto pamphlet—“A Letter to Program Managers”—which is not for sale. They show the same vigor and the same antic play of fancy inherent in his verse. In 1906 he took his first long tramp through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and in 1908 a second through the northeastern states. During these two, as in his latest like excursion through the Western wheat belt, he traveled as a minstrel, observing the following rules:

(1) Keep away from the cities.

(2) Keep away from the railroads.

(3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.

(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.

(5) Ask for supper, lodging and breakfast about quarter of five.

(6) Travel alone.

(7) Be neat, truthful, civil and on the square.

(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.

These appeared at the head of a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread,” the only baggage he carried besides a further printed statement called “The Gospel of Beauty.” In smiling defense of his course Mr. Lindsay has said that up to date there has been no established method for implanting beauty in the heart of the average American. “Until such a way has been determined upon by a competent committee, I must be pardoned for taking my own course and trying any experiment I please.” Mr. Lindsay has not limited himself to this way of circulating his ideas. He has posted his poems on billboards, recited them from soap boxes and on the vaudeville stage, and has even descended to select club audiences. He has, however, not allowed the calls of the lyceum managers to convert him from a poet to an entertainer. His books have been six in number and, according to his own advice, are to be read in the following order: “A Handy Guide for Beggars,” "Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty,” “The Art of the Moving Picture,” “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” “The Congo,” and “The Chinese Nightingale.” The first three are prose statements of his social and religious philosophy; the second three are poems. His seventh volume is announced as “The Golden Book of Springfield.” In its title it is a reaffirmation of what appears in many of his poems and of what he stated in “The Gospel of Beauty” (1912): “The things most worth while are one’s own hearth and neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful, and the holiest in the world.”

The obvious first point about the poetry of Mr. Lindsay is that in it he lives up to his own instructions. He keeps quite as close to his own district as Mr. Masters and Mr. Frost do and he indulges in as wide a play of imagination as does Mr. Robinson. In the rÔle of an apostle he tries to implant beauty in the heart of the average American. Yet “implant” is not the proper word; his own word is “establish,” for he re-enforces a latent sense of beauty in hearts that are unconscious of it and he reveals it in the lives of those whom the average American overlooks or despises. On the one hand, he carries whole audiences into an actual participation in his recitals and, on the other, he discloses the “scum of the earth” as poets and mystics.

Thus “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” tells of Booth’s apotheosis as it is seen and felt by a Salvation Army sympathizer. Booth with his big bass drum, followed by a motley slum crowd, leads to the most impressively magnificent place within the ken of a small-town Middle Westerner. This is an Illinois courthouse square. As a matter of fact, it is bleak, treeless, dust-blown, mud-moated—the dome of the courthouse in the middle, flanked on all sides with ugly brick blocks and alternating wooden shacks with corrugated iron false fronts; but this is splendor to the mind of the narrator. And so in all reverence he says:

From this scene General Booth ascends into heaven. “The Congo” is a similar piece of interpretation. Few types could seem more hopeless than the levee negroes, yet through them Mr. Lindsay makes a study of their race. In a drunken saloon crowd he sees the basic savagery which back in the Congo forests displays itself in picturesque poetry stuff. In a group of crapshooters who laugh down a police raid he finds the irrepressible high spirits which carry the negroes in imagination back to a regal Congo cakewalk, and in the exhortations of an African evangelist he sees the same hope of religion which the slave brought with him from his native soil. Once again, “The Chinese Nightingale” is written in the same spirit, this time accounting for the Chinese laundry-man’s tireless industry through the fact that while his iron pounds in the dead of night he is living in a world of oriental romance.

Mr. Lindsay’s poetry has two chief aspects, sometimes separated, sometimes compounded. One of these is an ethical seriousness. He might be called an ideally provincial character. He chooses to express himself in terms of his home and neighborhood, but his interests move out through a series of concentric circles which include his city, his state, America, and the world federation. The poems on Springfield, therefore, are of a piece with the poems on “America Watching the War” and those on “America at War.” “The Soul of the City,” with Mr. Lindsay’s own drawings, is quite as interesting as any of the poems above mentioned. “Springfield Magical” suggests the source of his inspiration:

“The Proud Farmer,” “The Illinois Village,” and “On the Building of Springfield”—three poems which conclude the General William Booth volume—are all on his favorite thesis and were favorites with his farmhouse auditors.

His poems related to the war reveal him as an ardent democrat, a hater of tyranny, a peace-loving socialist, and, in the end, like millions of his countrymen, a combatant pacifist, but none the less a pacifist in the larger sense. A pair of stanzas, “Concerning Emperors,” are a very pretty cue both to himself and his convictions. The first in fervent seriousness prays for new regicides; the second states the case unsmilingly, but as it might be put to any newsboy, concluding:

This leads naturally to his verses of fancy and whimsy, like the group called the “Christmas Tree,” “loaded with pretty toys,” or the twenty poems in which the moon is the chief figure of speech. And these lead naturally to his distinctive work in connection with poetic form, his fanciful and often whimsical experiments in restoring the half-chanted Greek choral odes to modern usage—what W. B. Yeats calls “the primitive singing of music” (expounding it charmingly in the volume “Ideas of Good and Evil”). Mr. Lindsay, in the “Congo” volume has indicated on some of the margins ways in which the verses might be chanted. Before many audiences he has illustrated his intent with awkwardly convincing effectiveness. And with the Poem Games, printed with “The Chinese Nightingale,” he has actually enlisted unsuspecting audiences as choruses and sent them home thrilled and amused at their awakened poetic susceptibility. Mr. Lindsay’s theories are briefly indicated in the two books just mentioned, in Miss Harriet Monroe’s introduction to the former and in the poet’s explanation of Poem Games in the latter. They are briefly stated and should be read by every student of his work. Like most of the developments in modern poetry they are very new only in being a revival of something very old, but in their application they are local, and they partake of their author’s genial, informal, democratic nature in being very American. Among the contemporary poets who are likely to leave an individual impress on American literature, Mr. Lindsay, to use a good Americanism, is one of the few who “will certainly bear watching.”

Miss Amy Lowell (1874- ) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather, and she numbers among her relatives her mother’s father, Abbott Lawrence, minister to England, and a brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard. In her education general reading and wide travel were the most important factors. In 1902, at the age of twenty-eight, she decided to devote herself to poetry, and for the next eight years she studied and wrote without attempting publication. Her first verse was printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1910, and her first volume, “A Dome of Many-Colored Glass,” was published in 1912. Her further volumes have been “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed” (1914), “Six French Poets” (1915), “Men, Women and Ghosts” (1916), “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry” (1917), and “Can Grande’s Castle” (1919),—in all, four volumes of verse and two of prose criticism. She has been a conspicuous personality among contemporary poets in France, England, and America, and though she has not been lacking in self-assertiveness she has been without question chiefly interested in the progress of contemporary poetry and finely generous in both theory and practice in the support of her fellow-poets.

As one of her most recent critics has pointed out, she has been notable and notably American in her zest for argument and in her love of experiment—“a female Roosevelt among the Parnassians.” She has championed the cause of modern poetry and has fought the conventions of Victorian verse wherever she has encountered them, and in her liking for experiment and her absorption in technique she has taken up the cudgels successively for free verse, for the tenets of Imagism, and for polyphonic prose. She has been most closely identified with the activities of the Imagist poets,—three Englishmen, two Anglicized Americans, and herself,—and it is therefore well to summarize the six objects to which they committed themselves: (1) to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, (2) to create new rhythms as the expression of new moods, (3) to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject (within the limits of good taste), (4) to present an image (hence the name “Imagist”), (5) to produce poetry that is hard and clear, (6) to insist on concentration as the essence of poetry. A stanza from “Before the Altar,” the opening poem in her first book, serves to illustrate her technique as an Imagist:

The fourth section of “Spring Day,” the poem in “Men, Women and Ghosts” which begins with the much-discussed “Bath,” is an example of her “polyphonic prose”:

In her essay on John Gould Fletcher, in “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” Miss Lowell has defined the Æsthetic intent of this poetic form: “‘Polyphonic’ means—many-voiced—and the form is so-called because it makes use of all the ‘voices’ of poetry, namely: metre, vers libre, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It employs every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times, but usually holds no particular one for long.... The rhymes may come at the ends of the cadences, or may appear in close juxtaposition to each other, or may be only distantly related.” These two forms, with the aid of the two formulas, may be tested at leisure from an abundance of passages; they correspond with their recipes, are distinct from each other, and have certain distinctive beauties. But a further experiment—the attempt to make the cadences of free verse harmonize with the movements of natural objects—is by no means so successful. “If the reader will turn,” says Miss Lowell, in the preface to “Men, Women and Ghosts,” “to the poem ‘A Roxbury Garden,’ he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up-and-down, elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock.” The following, presumably, is a segment of the circular movement:

It is an example, in fact, of the fruitlessness of dwelling on a matter of artistic form till it becomes more important than the artistic content. Miss Lowell admits in this connection that there flashed into her mind “the idea of using the movement of poetry.” The student, therefore, should not regard the resultant verses as anything more than experiments in technique, and at the same time he should speculate as to whether a vital artistic form can ever be imposed upon a subject instead of springing spontaneously from it.

Yet, although Miss Lowell’s reputation rests mainly on her experiments in novel and striking poetic forms, most of her work has been written in conformity with classic traditions. The opening volume is all in common rhythms, and so is most of the second, and quite half of the third. The last alone is devoted to a new form; “Can Grande’s Castle” contains four long poems in polyphonic prose. The tendency is clearly in the direction of the innovations, but thus far the balance is about even between the new and the old.

As to subject matter, Miss Lowell’s thesis is Poe’s: that poetry should not teach either facts or morals, but should be dedicated to beauty; it is a stained-glass window, a colored transparency. And the poet is a nonsocial being who

Like Poe she limits herself to the production of lyrics and tales and resorts not infrequently to grotesques and arabesques. Unlike Poe her resort to horror leads her to the composition of sex infidelities which are sometimes boring, sometimes foul, and rarely interesting. On this point (rule three for the Imagists) Miss Lowell falters awkwardly. “‘How can the choice of subject be absolutely unrestricted?’—horrified critics have asked. The only reply to such a question is that one had supposed one were speaking to people of common sense and intelligence.” The bounds of taste are assumed; yet these, she hastens to state, differ for different judges, and she illustrates her contention by the extreme extensiveness of her own. Finally, and again like Poe, Miss Lowell is to a high degree bookishly literary in her choice and treatment of subjects.

After all, for the attentive reader of contemporary poetry Miss Lowell’s most distinguished service has been in her two books of criticism. In the concourse of present-day poets she is a kind of drum major. One cannot see the procession without seeing her or admiring the skill with which she swings and tosses the baton. But when the parade is past, one can easily forget her until the trumpets blare again. She leads the way effectively, and one is glad to have her do it,—glad that there are those who enjoy being excellent drum majors. Then one pays farewell to her in the words with which she salutes Ezra Pound in her verses headed “Astigmatism”: "Peace be with you, [Sister]. You have chosen your part."

Witter Bynner (1881- ) was born in Brooklyn and is a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1902. He took the impress of his university and recorded it not only in an “Ode to Harvard” (1907)—reprinted in “Young Harvard and Other Poems”—but also in the two plays that followed, “Tiger” (1913) and “The Little King” (1914), neither of which have anything to do with Harvard, but both of which reflect the intelligent interest in drama encouraged at that seat of learning. Aside from “Iphigenia in Tauris” (1915), his remaining work, in which his real distinction lies, is the single poem “The New World” (1915) and the collection “Grenstone Poems” (1917). Into both of these are woven threads of the same story,—the poet’s love and marriage to Celia, the inspiration which comes to him from her finer nature, the birth and loss of their child, the death of Celia, his dull bereavement, the dedication of his life to the democracy which Celia had taught him to understand.

“Grenstone Poems” is a series of little idyls comparable in some respects to Frost’s “A Boy’s Will.” They are wholly individual in tone, presenting in brief lyrics, nearly two hundred in number, the quaint and lovely elements in the humor and the tragedy of life. “The New World,” in contrast, contains by implication much of this, but is constructed in nine sections which trace the progressive steps in the poet’s idealization of America. Always Celia’s imagination leads far in advance of his own. Again and again as he strives to follow, his triumphant ascent reaches as its climax what to her is a lower round in the ladder. Two passages suggest the theme in the abstract, though the beauty of the poem lies chiefly in the far implications of definite scenes and episodes. The first is a speech of Celia’s:

The second, with which this volume may well conclude, is in the poet’s own words:

BOOK LIST

General References

Collections

Works of Individual Men

Magazine Articles

The magazine articles on poetry are extremely numerous. From among those since 1900 the following are of special interest:

1900–1904. Poetry and the Stage. H. W. Boynton. Atlantic, Vol. XCII pp. 120–126. July, 1903.

Poetry of a Machine Age. G. S. Lee. Atlantic, Vol. LXXXV, pp. 756–763. June, 1900.

1905–1909. Certain Vagaries of the Poets. Atlantic, Vol. C, pp. 431–432. September, 1907.

1910–1914. Democracy and Poetry. Nation, XCIII, pp. 413–414. Nov. 2, 1911.

New Poetry. R. M. Alden. Nation, Vol. XCVI, pp. 386–387. April 17, 1913.

1910–1914. New Poets and Old Poetry. B. Hooker. Bookman, Vol. XXXI, pp. 480–486. July, 1910.

Taking Poetry too Seriously. Nation, Vol. XCVI, pp. 173–174. Feb. 20, 1913.

1915. Imagism, Another View. W. S. Braithwaite. New Republic, Vol. III, pp. 154–155. June 12, 1915.

1916. New Manner in Modern Poetry. A. Lowell. New Republic, Vol. VI, pp. 124–125. March 4, 1916.

1917. From Florence Coates to Amy Lowell: a Glance at Modernity. O. W. Firkins. Nation, Vol. CIV, pp. 522–524. May 3, 1917.