Robert Haven Schauffler

The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than anything else in life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

merica is trying to emerge from the awkward age. Its body is full-grown. Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. What does this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most needs contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, the wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with poetry's profound, spiritual insights.

The promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly this to-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed up in that curious symbol which appears over the letter n in the word "caÑon." A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of the American poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point about the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell into a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. This renaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority of readers and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let us glance at a few of the more popular explanations.

Many say that poetry declined in America because we turned ourselves into a nation of entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is true, how do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds and waterfalls, for groves of ancient trees, national parks, and city-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annual expenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the Fatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original, most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no utterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras, that produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury, French, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than Wall Street's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers of New York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, Bar Harbor's Building of Arts, West Point, and Princeton University. It is plain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism.

Other philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetry was the fault of the poets themselves. Popular interest slackened, they say, because the art first degenerated. Now an obvious answer to this is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become, men may always turn, if they will, to those dead poets of old who live forever on their shelves. But let us grant for the sake of argument that any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect poetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recall the situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic appreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, and Whitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment, and the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was the rare genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-day the most popular of our poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was in his prime. Thus it appears that public appreciation, and not creative power, was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of the Parnassian hill. Not until then did the poet come "tumbling after."

Moreover, in the light of modern Æsthetic psychology, this seems the more natural order of events. It takes two to make a work of art: one to produce, one to appreciate. The creative appreciator is a correlative of all artistic expression. It is almost impossible for the artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphere exhaled by the ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the callous, or the actively hostile. It follows that the demand for poetry is created no more by the supply than the supply is created by the demand. Thus the general indifference to this one department of American art was not primarily caused by the degenerating supply.

The decline and fall of our poetic empire have yet other Gibbons who say that our civilization suddenly changed from the country to the urban type, and that our love of poetry began to disappear simultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and the mushroom growth of the large cities. So far I agree; but not with their reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities are such dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymous only with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germans call the "heaven-scratcher," with elevated railways, "sand hogs," whirring factories, and alleys reeking with the so-called "dregs" of Europe. They claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar creed of the modern city is epitomized by such things as a certain signboard in New York, which offers a typically neo-urban solution of the old problem, "What is art?"

the board declares. And this, they say, is about as poetic as a large city ever becomes.

Now let us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of Mr. James Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almost completely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and the slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play with elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and glorious a battlefield as any Tours or Gettysburg of them all. And the dingy, battered old "L" train, as it clatters through the East Side early on "morose, gray Monday morning," becomes a divine chariot

Oh, yes; there is "God's plenty" of poetry in these sights and sounds, if only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness. But there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawn from the city by him who, instead of thus straitly confining his gaze to any one aspect of urban life, is able to see it steadily and see it whole, with its subtle nuances and its over-powering dramatic contrasts—as a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, might see it if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold's sculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuous beauty. What "songs greater than before known" might such a poet not sing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxon culture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of St. Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored life of all southeastern Europe surging about that slender iron fence—children of the blood of Chopin and Tschaikowsky; of Gutenberg, Kossuth, and Napoleon; of Isaiah and Plato, Leonardo and Dante—with the wild strains of the gypsy orchestra floating across Second Avenue, and to the southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of builders clambering on the cupola of a neighboring Giotto's tower built of steel? Who dares say that the city is unpoetic? It is one of the most poetic places on earth.

These, then, are the chief explanations which have been offered us to-day of the historic decline of the American poetry-lover. We weigh them, and find them wanting. Why? Because they have sought, like radiographers, far beneath the surface; whereas the real trouble has been only skin deep. I shall try to show the nature of this trouble; and how, by beginning to cure it, we have already brought on a poetic renaissance.

Most of us who care for poetry frequently have one experience in common. During our summer vacations in the country we suddenly re-discover the well-thumbed "Golden Treasury" of Palgrave, and the "Oxford Book of Verse" which have been so unaccountably neglected during the city winter. We wander farther into the poetic fields and revel in Keats and Shakespeare. We may even attempt once more to get beyond the first book of the "FaËrie Queene," or fumble again at the combination lock which seems to guard the meaning of the second part of "Faust." And we find these occupations so invigorating and joyful that we model and cast an iron resolution to the effect that this winter, whatever betide, we will read a little poetry every day, or every week, as the case may be. On that we plunge back into the beautiful, poetic, inspiring city, and adhere to our poetry-reading program—for exactly a fortnight. Then, unaccountably, our resolve begins to slacken. We cannot seem to settle our minds to ordered rhythms "where more is meant than meets the ear." Our resolve collapses. Once again Palgrave is covered with dust. But vacation time returns. After a few days in green pastures and beside still waters the soul suddenly turns like a homing-pigeon to poetry. And the old, perplexing cycle begins anew.

A popular magazine once sent a certain young writer and ardent amateur of poetry on a long journey through the Middle West. He took but one book in his bag. It was by Whitman (the poet of cities, mark). And he determined to read it every evening in his bedroom after the toils of the day. The first part of the trip ran in the country. "Afoot and light-hearted" he took to the open road every morning, and reveled every evening in such things as "Manahatta," "The Song of Joys," and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Then he carried his poet of cities to a city. But the two would have nothing to do with one another. And to the traveler's perplexity, a place no larger than Columbus, Ohio, put a violent end to poetry on that trip.

In our day most poetry-lovers have had such experiences. These have been hard to explain, however, only because their cause has been probed for too profoundly. The chief cause of the decline of poetry was not spiritual but physical. Cities are not unpoetic in spirit. It is only in the physical sense that Emerson's warning is true: "If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York ... thou shalt find no radiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods." The trouble was this: that the modern type of city, when it started into being, back in the seventies, began to take from men, and to use up, that margin of nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of vitality of which so much has already been said in this book, and which is always needed for the true appreciation of poetry. Grant Allen has shown that man, when he is conscious of a superfluity of sheer physical strength, gives himself to play; and in like manner, when he is conscious of a superfluity of receptive power, which has a physical basis, he gives himself to art.

Now, though all of the arts demand of their appreciators this overplus of nervous energy (and Heaven knows perfectly well how inadequate a supply is offered up to music and the arts of design!), yet the appreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands this bloom on the cheek of existence. For poetry, with quite as much of emotional demand as the others, combines a considerably greater and more persistent intellectual demand, involving an unusual amount of physical wear and tear. Hence, in an era of overstrain, poetry is the first of the arts to suffer.

Most lovers of poetry must realize, when they come to consider it, that their pleasure in verse rises and falls, like the column of mercury in a barometer, with the varying levels of their physical overplus. Physical overplus, however, is the thing which life in a modern city is best calculated to keep down.

Surely it was no mere coincidence that, back there in the seventies, just at the edge of the poetic decline, city life began to grow so immoderately in volume and to be "speeded up" and "noised up" so abruptly that it took our bodies by surprise. This process has kept on so furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able to catch up. No large number have yet succeeded in readjusting themselves completely to the new pace of the city. And this continues to exact from most of us more nervous energy than any life may, which would keep us at our best. Hence, until we have succeeded either in accomplishing the readjustment, or in spending more time in the country, the appreciation of poetry has continued to suffer.

Even in the country, it is, of course, perfectly true that life spins faster now than it used to—what with telephones and inter-urban trolleys, the motor, and the R.F.D. But this rural progress has arrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powers of readjustment. When we go from city to country we recede to a rate of living with which our nervous systems can comfortably fall in, and still control for the use of the mind and spirit a margin of that delicious vital bloom which resembles the ring of the overtones in some beautiful voice.

But how is it practicable to keep this margin in the city, when the roar of noisy traffic over noisy pavements, the shrieks of newsboy and peddler, the all-pervading chronic excitement, the universal obligation to "step lively," even at a funeral, are every instant laying waste our conscious or unconscious powers? How are we to give the life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin is forever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due to lack of sleep, unhygienic surroundings, constant interruption (or the expectation thereof), and the impossibility of relaxation owing to the never-ending excitement and interest and sexual stimulus of the great human pageant—its beauty and suggestiveness?

Apart from the general destruction of the margin of energy, one special thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry is to keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of the importance of the present moment. We might call this sense the journalistic spirit of the city. How many typical metropolitans one knows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whatever is just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire, or a neurÆsthete—if one may coin a word—who perceives a spider on her collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of course, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our innumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely in the present minute, and often in the very most sensational second of that minute, that one grows impatient of the "olds," and comes to regard a constantly renewed and increased dose of "news" as the only present help in a chronic time of trouble. This is a kind of mental drug-habit. And its origin is physical. It is a morbid condition induced by the over-paced life of cities.

Long before the rise of the modern city—indeed, more than a century ago—Goethe, who was considerably more than a century ahead of his age, wrote to Schiller from Frankfort of the journalistic spirit of cities and its relation to poetry:

It seems to me very remarkable how things stand with the people of a large city. They live in a constant delirium of getting and consuming, and the thing we call atmosphere can neither be brought to their attention nor communicated to them. All recreations, even the theater, must be mere distractions; and the great weakness of the reading public for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that the former always, and the latter generally, brings distraction into the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I have noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions—or at least in so far as they are poetic—which seems to me to follow quite naturally from these very causes. Poetry requires, yes, it absolutely commands, concentration. It isolates man against his own will. It forces itself upon him again and again; and is as uncomfortable a possession as a too constant mistress.