•- ;:;;::B-''r:i!i 
 
 
 ^l^'K- 
 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 ^ «•■ 
 
 *x. 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1 8.9 1 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornell University Library 
 
 PS 324.L91 
 
 Tendencies In modern American poetry. 
 
 3 1924 021 959 089 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021959089 
 
TENDENCIES IN 
 MODERN AMERICAN POETRY 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW VORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANQSCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limitbd 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN, CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
_ , .■!( 
 
 jC ^' ^7^^-^' 
 
TENDENCIES 
 
 IN MODERN AMERICAN 
 
 POETRY 
 
 BY 
 AMY LOWELL 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MEN, WOMEN AND GHOSTS " 
 "SIX FRENCH POETS," ETC. 
 
 Wefa gorft 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1917 
 
 All rights restrved 
 
Copyright, 1917, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, X917. 
 
 J. S. Gushing Co. —Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It is impossible for any one writing to-day not to be 
 affected by the war. It has overwhelmed us like a tidal 
 wave. It is the equinoctial storm which bounds a period. 
 So I make no apology for beginning a book of poetical 
 essays with a reference to the war. In fact, the war and 
 the subject of this volume are not so far apart as might 
 at first appear. 
 
 i The so-called "new movement" in American poetry is 
 [evidence of the rise of a native school. The welding to- 
 gether of the whole country which the war has brought 
 about, the mobilizing of our whole population into a 
 single, strenuous endeavour, has produced a more poignant 
 sense of nationality than has recently been the case in 
 this country of enormous spaces and heterogeneous pop- 
 ulation. Hyphens are submerged in the solid over- 
 printing of the word "America." We are no more 
 colonies of this or that other land, but ourselves, different 
 from aU other peoples whatsoever. 
 
 It is this realization of ourselves that has drawn us into 
 an understanding sjmipathy with our allies hardly to be 
 conceived of before. And let us make no mistake ; such 
 a result cannot be reached through a devotion to the 
 teachings of materialism. The real truth is that at a 
 time when most people were bewailing the growth of 
 
i Preface 
 
 laterialism, already, beneath the surface, the seething of 
 new idealism was in process. 
 
 Long before the shadow of battle flung itself over the 
 orld, the travail of this idealism began. Slowly, pain- 
 lUy, it took on a shape, hidden away in the dreams and 
 esires of unknown men. 
 
 Literature is rooted to life, and although a work of art 
 
 great only because of its aesthetic importance, still its 
 ery sestheticism is conditioned by its sincerity and by the 
 ;rength of its roots. Posterity cares nothing for the views 
 hich urged a man to write ; to it, the poetry, its beauty 
 3 a work of art, is the only thing which matters. But 
 lat beauty could not exist without the soil from which it 
 raws its sustenance, and it is a fact that those works of 
 rt which are superficial or jneretriciousdo certainly per- 
 h remarkably soon. This is why time alone can deter- 
 dne a man's fate. Tinsel can be made to look extraordi- 
 arily Hke gold ; it is only wear which rubs oflE the plating. 
 
 To a certain extent, the change which marks American 
 oetry has been going on in the literature of other coun- 
 ies also. But not quite in the same way. Each cotm- 
 •y approaches an evolutionary step from its own racial 
 tigle, and they move alternately, first one leads and then 
 tiother, but all together, if we look back a centiuy or so, 
 love the world forward into a new path. At the 
 loment of writing, it is America who has taken the last, 
 lost advanced step. 
 
 It is not my intention, here, to combat the opinions of 
 le conservatives. Conservatives are always with us, 
 ley have been opposing change ever since the days of 
 le cave-men. But, fortunately for mankind, they 
 
Preface vii 
 
 agitate in vain. Already the more open . minded see 
 that the change going on in the arts is not a mere friv- 
 olous interest in experiment. Already the reasons for 
 difference begin to stand out clearly. We who watch 
 realize something of the grandeur of conception toward 
 which this evolution is working. 
 
 The modem poets are less concerned with dogma and 
 more with truth. They see in the universe a huge 
 sjnmbol, and so absolute has this symbol become to them 
 that they have no need to dwell constantly upon its sym- 
 bolic meaning. For this reason, the symbol has taken on 
 a new intensity, and is given much prominence. What 
 appear to be pure nature poems are of course so, but in a 
 different way from most nature poems of the older 
 writers ; for nature is not now something separate from 
 man, man and nature are recognized as a part of a whole, 
 man being a part of nature, and all falling into a place in 
 a yast4)lan^the key to which is natural science. 
 
 In some modem American poets this attitude is more 
 conscious than in others, but all have been affected by it ; 
 it has modified poetry, as it is more slowly modifying the 
 wbate of our social fabric. 
 
 What sets the poets of to-day apart from those of the 
 Victorian era is an entire difference of outlook. Ideas 
 believed to be fimdamental have disappeared and given 
 place to others. And as poetry is the expression of the 
 heart of man, so it reflects this change to its smallest 
 particle. 
 
 It has been my endeavour in these essays to follow this 
 evolution, in the movement as a whole, and also in the 
 work of the particular poets who compose it. I have tried 
 
viii Preface 
 
 to show what has led each of these men to adopt the habit of 
 mind which now characterizes him, why he has been forced 
 out of one order into another ; how his ideas have grad- 
 ually taken form in his mind, and in what way he expresses 
 this form in his work. I have pointed out his ancestry, 
 physical as well as mental, and have noted where atavism 
 has held him back, where pushed him forward. 
 
 I wish I had space to consider all the men and women 
 whose work has aided to make this movement vigorous 
 and important. But that must be left to future literary 
 historians. Still, it is with regret that I pass by the work 
 of Mr. Louis Untermeyer and Mr. James Oppenheim, of 
 Mr. Ezra Pound and Mr. Vachel Lindsay, of Mr. William 
 Rose Ben^t and Mrs. Eunice Tietjens, and others as well, 
 but the main tendencies of which they are a part have 
 been considered under other names. It is true that at a 
 first glance Mr. Lindsay does not seem to fall very readily 
 into any of these groups, but I think a closer attention will 
 find him to be rather popularizing the second stage of 
 the movement than heading a completely new tendency 
 of his own. 
 
 As to those poets who still cUng to an older order, of 
 course, in such a volume as this, their work can find no 
 place however excellent it may be in itself. 
 
 How shall one write a book of literary criticism ? What 
 weight shall one lay on biography ; what on assthetics ? I 
 \ quite agree with that brilliant disciple of Signor Benedetto 
 i Croce, Mr. J. E. Spingam, that the criticism of art should 
 be first, foremost, and all the time, aesthetic. As I have 
 already said, its aesthetic value is, in the final simaming 
 up, the only value of a work of art, as such. But life, 
 
Preface ix 
 
 too, has a right to its criticism, and to the lover of poetry 
 the life which conditioned the poems also has its charm. 
 Therefore I have considered these poets as men and 
 artists. 
 
 It is my good fortune to know all these poets, but I 
 have tried not to let friendship interfere with opinion. 
 StUl it is possible that personal intercourse may have led 
 to a closer understanding of aims and motives than I 
 realize. That it has enabled me to round out the brief 
 biographies submitted to me by the poets themselves, I 
 am weU aware. The facts of a man's hfe tell very little, 
 unless one also knows the man ; and a couple of pages of 
 dates and occupations alone would certainly not have 
 enabled me to write as I have done, had not the memory of 
 many conversations come to my aid. 
 
 My thanks, therefore, are chiefly due to the poets 
 themselves, who have helped me with all the information 
 they had to give and with outlines of the events of their 
 lives. The photographs here reproduced I owe to their 
 kindness. I am also indebted to the courtesy of various 
 publishers for permission to reprint the poems which 
 appear in the text. To The MacmiUian jCompany for 
 extracts from Mr. Robinson's volumes, "Captain Craig," 
 "The Man Against the Sky," and "Merliri," and from Mr. 
 Masters' volumes, "The Spoon River Anthology," "Songs 
 and Satires," and "The Great Valley" ; to Messrs. Henry 
 Holt and Company for poems reprinted from Mr. Frost's 
 books, "A Boy's Will," "North of Boston," and "Moun- 
 tain Interval," and from Mr. Sandburg's volume, 
 "Chicago Poems"; to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and 
 Company for the quotations from "H. D."'s "Sea 
 
X Preface 
 
 Garden," and Mr. Fletcher's "Irradiations — Sand and 
 Spray" and "Goblins and Pagodas"; to Messrs. Charles 
 Scribner's Sons for the poems, "The Children of the 
 Night," "John Evereldown," "Richard Cory," and "Cliff 
 IQingenhagen," from Mr. Robinson's "The Children of 
 the Night," and "The Master," "Doctor of BiUiards," 
 and "How Annandale Went Out," from the same author's 
 "The Town Down the River"; to The New Republic 
 Company for Mr. Fletcher's "Clipper-Ships;" and to 
 The Four Seas Company for the same author's Japan- 
 ese poems. I should also add that certain parts of these 
 essays have appeared in "The New RepubHc," "The 
 Poetry Journal," and "The Poetry Review," and that 
 the nucleus of the volume was a course of lectures de- 
 livered at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 
 January, 191 7. 
 
 It is impossible for the judgment of any one critic to be 
 final. In fact, no contemporary criticism can make any 
 such pretence. Hitherto, American students have felt this 
 so strongly that practically no serious consideration of con- 
 temporary work has been attempted. Other cotintries, 
 however, are not so modest. France, particularly, de- 
 lights in analyzing the art of the time. The French realize 
 that a contemporary can often reveal facets in an author's 
 work which may be hidden from posterity, that certain 
 nuances can only be apprehended by a person living under 
 the same conditions. This must be my excuse for 
 attempting a study of living authors. Also, that they 
 are poets. For, recently, in England and America, a 
 movement has started which has taken form in various 
 little booklets, monographs of this and that novelist for 
 
Preface xi 
 
 the most part. Poetry has not been touched upon ; and 
 this is strange, for poetay^ far mo re thgjLfigtion, reveals 
 tfeesotjLotJhunianity. Poets are always the advance guard 
 of literature; the advance guard of life^ It is for this 
 reason that their recognition comes so slowly. 
 
 AMY LOWELL. 
 Brookline, 
 
 July I, 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 •^Edwin Arlington Robinson 3 
 
 Robert Frost 79 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg . . 139 
 
 The Imagists : 
 
 "H.D." AND John Gould Fletcher .... 235 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 E. A. Robinson .' Frontispiece 
 
 PACING PAGE 
 
 Robert Frost 77 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters ^37 
 
 Carl Sandburg 201 
 
 "H. D." 233 
 
 John Gould Fletcher 281 
 
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 
 
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 
 
 When people speak of the "New Poetry," they 
 generally mean that poetry which is written in the 
 new er, freer form s. But such a distinction is mis- 
 leading in the extreme, for, after all, forms are 
 merely forms, of no particular value unless they are 
 the necessary and adequate clothing to some par- 
 ticular manner of thought. 
 
 There is a^New Poetry " to-day, and thenewforms 
 are a part of its attire, but the body is more impor- 
 tant than the clothing and existed before it. All 
 real changes are a matter of slow growth, of evolu- 
 tion. The beginnings of a change are almost im- 
 perceptible, the final stages, on the other hand, 
 being so radical that everyone remarks them, and 
 with such astonishment that the cry of "freak," 
 "charlatan," is almost sure to be raised by ignorant 
 readers. 
 
 A great artistic movement is as inevitable a thing 
 as the growth of a race. But, as in races, individ- 
 uals possess differing characteristics, so the various 
 
 3 
 
4 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 artists whose work represents a revolt may differ 
 most widely one from another, and yet, in varying 
 still more widely from artists of other epochs, they 
 create what critics call a "movement." 
 
 In this book, I have attempted no catalogue of 
 present-day American poets. There are excellent 
 poets whose work I am not going to touch upon. 
 I shall only consider those few poets who seem most 
 markedly to represent a tendency. A poetic move- 
 ment may be compared to a braid of woven strands. 
 Of the six poets of whom I shall speak, each is an 
 exemplar, and I think the most typical exemplar, of 
 ^ a strand. But one particular tinge is peculiar to 
 all the strands, an d that particular tinge i s revolt 
 against, the immediate oast . 
 
 ir We shall see these poets revolting against sfilted 
 phrases and sentimentality ; we shall see tKem en- 
 deavouring to express themselves, and the new race 
 I which America is producing ; we shall see them step- 
 iping boldly from realism to far flights of imagination. 
 We shall see them ceding more and inore to uiie in- 
 I fiuence of other, alien, peoples, and fusing exotic 
 modes of thought with their Anglo-Saxon inherit- 
 ance. This is indeed the melting pot, and its fumes 
 affect the surrounding company as well as the in- 
 gredients in the crucible. 
 
 To understand the change which is going on in 
 American poetry, it is necessary to glance back for 
 a moment to earlier conditions. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 5 
 
 If we examine the state of American poetry from, 
 let us say, 1830 until the Civil War, we shall be 
 struck with one thing. That is, with the racial 
 homogeneity of our poets. They are all of good 
 English stock, in their work, I mean. It is true that 
 two great geniuses flung themselves up out of this 
 mass of cultivated endeavour. But that is no ex- 
 ception to the Anglo-Saxon rule, for no literature is 
 richer in geniuses than is the English. But these 
 two. geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, 
 were too far ahead of their times to have much effect 
 upon their contemporaries. They are better under- 
 stood, and have more followers, in the America of 
 to-day. Wordsworth on the one hand, Byron on 
 the other, were the main springs of American poetry. 
 Good poetry, if not strikingly great poetry, 
 marked the epoch of Whittier, Bryant, Emerson, ■ 
 Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes. They were Eng- \ 
 liish provincial poets, in the sense that America was 
 still a literary province of the Mother Country. 
 C But from the Civil War until almost the present 
 I day, the literary sponsors of American verse were 
 I much less worthy of disciples. The robustness of 
 "Byron gave place to the sugared sentimentality of 
 Tennyson ; the moral strength of Wordsworth made 
 way for the frozen didacticism of Matthew Arnold. 
 But worse was to follow, for technique usurped the 
 place of emotion, and words, mere words, were 
 exalted out of all due proportion, Swinburne and 
 
6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Rossetti are not good masters to follow, no matter 
 with what skill they themselves wrought. Only 
 those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shake- 
 spearean tradition achieved any measure of success. 
 But Keats was the last great exponent of that tra- 
 dition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in 
 charm, the copies of Keats have become. No 
 matter how beautiful a piece of music may be, we 
 cannot hear it indefinitely without satiety, and the 
 same piece rendered by a phonograph soon becomes 
 unbearable. Our poets were largely phonographs 
 to greater English poets dead and gone, as the pages 
 of our magazines of twenty years ago will abundantly 
 prove. 
 
 Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far 
 'ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by 
 following some other line. Faultless, flowing verses, 
 raised about a worn-out, threadbare idea — fine 
 moral sentiments expressed in the weak, innocuous 
 language of the hymn-books — had no resemblance 
 to the temper of modern American life. Publishers 
 still printed poetry, but not with any idea of its 
 answering a demand; editors accepted it to round 
 out short pages, but they hardly expected to have 
 more attention accorded it than an ornamental scroll 
 would have received. Readers found more sus- 
 tenance in Browning, and bewailed the fact that he 
 was dead, and, alas, English ! America was not a 
 country for poets, said the wiseacres, it was given 
 
 l( 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 7 
 
 over, to materialism, and materialism could never 
 produce art. 
 
 This was tantamount to saying that art was an 
 artificial thing, whereas making steel harrows was 
 a natural thing. Of course, that is a ridiculous point 
 ■of view. /Art, true art, is the desire of a man to 
 express himself, to record the reactions of his 
 personality to the world he lives in. Great emotion 
 always tends to beconie rhythmic, and out of that 
 tendency the forms of art have been evolved. /Art 
 becomes artificial only when the forms take pre- 
 cedence over the emotion./ 
 
 Now here was a great country practically dumb. 
 Here was a virile race, capable of subduing a vast 
 continent in an incredibly short time, with no 
 tongue to vent its emotion. How should such a 
 race express itself by the sentiments appropriate to 
 a highly civilized country no bigger than New York 
 State, and of that country some fifty years earlier, 
 to boot? 
 
 I would not be construed into saying that the 
 larger the country, the more profound the emotions. 
 That would be absurd. I only mean that the ma- 
 terial conditions under which Americans lived — 
 the great unoccupied spaces, the constant warring 
 and overcoming of nature, the fluid state of the 
 social fabric — all made a different speech neces- 
 sary, if they were really to express the thoughts 
 that were in them. 
 
8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 There was one other element in the constitution 
 of the American pefJpIeTquite as important as these 
 I have mentioned. That element was, and is, the 
 ingrained Puritanism which time and place do so 
 little to eradicate. Of course, the dwellers in large 
 cities, worked upon from their earliest childhood by 
 modern conditions, were able to modify the Puritan 
 sentiment, to cast out what of poison remained in it. 
 ^or Puritanism, at this late day, has resolved itself 
 into a virulent poison which saps vitality and brings 
 on the convulsions of despair./ 
 
 /rxintamsm. was always a drastic, soul-searching,^ 
 joyless religion. / It was itself a revolt against a 
 licence that had become unbearable. But no stu- 
 dent of history can fail to be struck with the vigour 
 and healthy-mindedness of a race which can live 
 under such an incubus and retain its sanity. There 
 is no more horrible page to the student than that of 
 the early times in New England, when nervous little 
 children were tortured with exhortations to declare 
 their faith and escape the clutches of the devil, and 
 senile old women were burned for witches. Moloch 
 and his sacrifices of human victims is no more re- 
 volting. Yet, in spite of much infant mortality, 
 and many of the weaker members of a community 
 going insane, the people as a whole lived and throve 
 under this threatening horror, with the vitality of a 
 race born to endure. 
 
 Indeed, my simile of a drug Is no idle comparison. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 9 
 
 For Puritanism undoubtedly did much to strengthen 
 the fibre of the early settlers, but its prolonged effect 
 has been to produce anaemia and atrophy, and where 
 these do not follow j/where the strength of the in- 
 dividual keeps him fighting for the cause of indi- 
 viduality against the , composite thought of a race, 
 the result is an innate cynicism, a dreadful despair 
 which will not let him he./ 
 
 The age of Bryant and Longfellow was singularly 
 free from these negative, but powerful, results of 
 the Puritanic poison. Didactic and moral these 
 poets undoubtedly were, but with them the paternal 
 tradition was diluted by nothing more violent than 
 time. They were in sympathy with its main trend 
 only ; like fruits set in the sun, the substance itself 
 had mellowed and sweetened. Living in a highly 
 educated community, they modified with it, and 
 only so far as it, too, modified. They were not at 
 war with their times, their surroundings, or their 
 fellow citizens. 
 
 In the case of smaller places, the result is very 
 different. Here, Puritanism held sway quite out 
 of time. It persisted long after it had becomg'an 
 anachronism to New England at large. An indi- 
 vidual brought up in one of the small towns scat- 
 tered over the country was therefore obliged to 
 reproduce suddenly in himself the evolution of three 
 hundred years. In so far as he was advanced men- 
 tally beyond his fellows, he suffered the pangs of 
 
10 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 growth and misunderstanding. And his evolution 
 carried with it the farther torture of consciousness. 
 Sudden change can never accomplish the result of 
 a long, slow process. What large cities like Boston 
 lived into, the clever youths of smaller towns were 
 thrust violently upon. 
 
 I /We must never forget that all inherited prejudice 
 and training pulls one way, in these unfortunate 
 leases ; the probing, active mind pulls another. The 
 
 Irpsnl^ iq i^ pt-^frM^nr] rriol^rir^Vi^ly tJnjTprl with cyn i- 
 
 n'aiji . / Self-analysis has sapped joy, and the im- 
 possibility of constructing an ethical system in 
 accordance both with desire and with tradition has 
 twisted the mental vision out of all true proportion. 
 It takes the lifetime of more than one individual to 
 throw off a superstition, and the effort to do so is 
 not made without sacrifice. 
 
 Unless one understand this fact, one cannot com- 
 prehend the difficult and beautiful poetry of Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson. 
 
 Mr. Robinson, as his name implies, comes of good 
 Anglo-Saxon stock. His father, Edward Robinson, 
 was a grain merchant in the village of Head Tide, 
 Maine, where his son was bom on December 22, 
 1869. 
 
 Head Tide is a picturesque little village on the 
 Sheepscott River, some miles east of the Kennebec. 
 Time has moved slowly at Head Tide, and customs 
 have moved as slowly. There is still the village inn 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson ii 
 
 with a ball-room on the top floor, where the whole 
 countryside gathers on occasions, as they did one 
 hundred years ago. There is still the old water- 
 mill by the river, where the wood is still brought to 
 be sawed. 
 
 Edwin Robinson was only two or three years old, 
 however, when his parents moved to the more con- 
 siderable town of Gardiner, his father having become 
 a director of the local bank. 
 
 In exchanging Head Tide for Gardiner, the Robin- 
 son family merely left an old-world village for an 
 old-world town. I know of no place in America so 
 English in atmosphere as Gardiner. Standing on the 
 broad, blue Kennebec, the little town nestles proudly 
 beside that strange anomaly in an American city 
 — the Manor House. For Gardiner has, so far as 
 custom is concerned, possessed a squire for over two 
 hundred years. And this gentleman's house is as 
 truly the "Great House," as that in any hamlet in 
 England. A fine Tudor mansion of grey stone with 
 rounded bow windows, it stands on a little hill above 
 the river, and even the railroad tracks which modern 
 commercialism has inconsiderately laid along the 
 nearer bank, cannot take away from it its air of 
 dominating dignity. 
 
 It is not only in appearance that Gardiner house 
 harks back to English tradition. It is a house not 
 only in material fact, but in genealogical, for there 
 have been Gardiners of Gardiner ever since the first 
 
12 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry • 
 
 fox-hunting squire transferred himself and his dogs 
 to the New World. From eldest son to eldest son, 
 keeping up a sentimental entail in lieu of the legal 
 one our country has eschewed, the house and grounds 
 have descended. Old customs, too, have not been 
 allowed to languish. Every Christmas, the country- 
 side repairs to the "Great House" for the annual 
 ball, and the polished floors still reflect the shine of 
 wax candles. 
 
 At the time the Robinson family went to live in 
 Gardiner, a momentary cloud hung over the fortunes 
 of the "Great House." The open-handed hospital- 
 ity of a hundred years was showing its effect, and the 
 Gardiner family possessed their house, some of their 
 land, and but little else. The owner was doing all 
 that thrift and skill could do to repair the mistakes 
 of his ancestors, but in order to accomplish this he 
 was engaged in business in Boston. The house was 
 vacant for months at a time, much of it was out of 
 repair, outlying acres had been sold. Still the owner 
 clung to his ancestral hall, to raise it, as he has done, 
 like a phoenix from the ashes. But the raising was 
 not yet. In Mr. Robi nson's chil dhood, it stood as a 
 paretic m onumen t of"tiie folly of attemptin g to 
 ggaft the old or der of things upon the n ew. 
 
 What the boy thought of this old stone mansion, 
 standing magnificent, still, and silent, beside the 
 growing little town, whether he ever speculated upon 
 its past, its present, we do not know. I have dwelt 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 13 
 
 upon it here as a symbol. A symbol of the world 
 into which he was born. Gardiner is the "Tilbury 
 Town" of so many of his poems, and his volume 
 "Captain Craig" is dedicated "To the Memory of 
 John Hays Gardiner," one of his first and most 
 sincere admirers. 
 
 Mr. Robinson has given us very few glimpses of 
 his childhood in his work, although a number of his 
 scenes seem to have Tilbury Town for a background. 
 But one, "Isaac and Archibald," published in the 
 volume, "Captain Craig," may very well be auto- 
 biographical. Whether it records an actual event, 
 or is merely a composite photograph of certain 
 remembered childish occasions, it is worth quoting 
 here for the picture it gives of the serious, contem- 
 plative l ittle boy gazing with wide eyes at a stra nge, 
 contradictory world. A world which contains at 
 once such realities as"apples and tireilegs^^Jlisuch 
 vague incomprehagsibilijigs , as- oid.^age-.aiid'^^e 
 reactions of a Sunimer sun. /This is New England, 
 but New England seen through a temperament, as 
 the French idiom puts it. It is all here, the sharpi 
 clear strokes of description, the psychological signifil 
 cance, the brooding melancholy which will not baj 
 shaken off, the questioning which finds no answerj 
 
 The poem begins with the simplicity of statement 
 of an old ballad : 
 
 Isaac and Archibald were two old men. 
 
14 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 ' This is noteworthy, for Mr. Robinson is one of the 
 
 ' few modem poets who can manage the baldness of 
 
 I ballad technique without dropping into triviality./ 
 
 He seldom writes a whole poem in this manner, but 
 
 uses it with telling effect on occasion. But to return 
 
 to the poem. 
 
 Archibald lives at a farm some distance from the 
 village, and Isaac conceives the idea that Archibald's 
 mind is failing, and that he probably is letting the 
 farm run down. The fact that it is Archibald's 
 farm, and none of Isaac's business, in no wise deflects 
 Isaac from his purpose. 
 
 It was high time 
 Those oats were cut, said Isaac ; and he feared 
 That Archibald — well, he could never feel 
 Quite sure of Archibald. Accordingly 
 The good old man invited me — that is, 
 Permitted me — to go along with him ; 
 And I, with a small boy's adhesiveness 
 To competent old age, got up and went. 
 
 The two start for the farm on foot : 
 
 With all the wannth and wonder of the land 
 Around us, and the wayside flash of leaves. 
 
 But soon the boy begins to find such fast walking 
 difficult, and in this passage Mr. Robinson shows a 
 tenderness and humour rare in his work : 
 
 somewhere at the end of the first mile 
 I foimd that I was figuring to find 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 15 
 
 How long those ancient legs of his would keep 
 
 The pace that he had set for them. The sun 
 
 Was hot, and I was ready to sweat blood ; 
 
 But Isaac, for aught I could make of him, 
 
 Was cool to his hat-band. So I said then 
 
 With a dry gasp of affable despair, 
 
 Something about the scorching days we have 
 
 In August without knowing it sometimes ; 
 
 But Isaac said the day was like a dream, 
 
 And praised the Lord, and talked about the breeze. 
 
 After a while, however, the boy persuades his com- 
 panion to sit down for a little, and the psychological 
 theme, the main theme of the poem, begins on the 
 old man's conversation : 
 
 "My good young friend," he said, "you cannot feel 
 What I have seen so long. You have the eyes — 
 Oh, yes — but you have not the other things : 
 The sight within that never wiU deceive, 
 You do not know — you have no right to know ; 
 The twilight warning of experience. 
 The singular idea of loneliness, — 
 These are not yours. But they have long been mine. 
 And they have shown me now for seven years 
 That Archibald is changing." 
 
 He goes on to say how life is slipping from them 
 both, but how Archibald is much farther on the down- 
 ward path than he. Always one feels the pathetic 
 attempt to bolster up himself, to prove himself very 
 much alive, by showing the failings of Archibald : 
 
1 6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 ". . when the best friend of your Ufe goes down, 
 When you first know in him the slacking 
 That comes, and coming always tells the end, — 
 Now in a common word that wotdd have passed 
 Uncaught from any other lips than his. 
 Now in some trivial act of every day. 
 Done as he might have done it all along 
 But for a twinging Httle difference 
 That bites you hke a squirrel's teeth." 
 
 Then the hints come which reveal what he is dread- 
 ing for himself : 
 
 " Look at me, my boy, 
 
 And when the time shall come for you to see 
 That I must follow after him, try then 
 To think of me, to bring me back again. 
 Just as I was to-day. Think of the place 
 Where we are sitting now, and think of me — 
 Think of old Isaac as you knew him then. 
 When you set out with him in August once 
 To see old Archibald." 
 
 The poet sums up the old man's words : 
 
 The words come back 
 Almost as Isaac must have uttered them. 
 And there comes with them a dry memory 
 Of something in my throat that would not move. 
 
 The adjective " dry " is excellently chosen. 
 
 But the boy is puzzled and can find nothing to say : 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 17 
 
 My mouth was full 
 
 Of words, and they would have been comforting 
 
 To Isaac, spite of my twelve years, I think ; 
 
 But there was not in me the willingness 
 
 To speak them out. Therefore I watched the ground ; 
 
 And I was wondering what made the Lord 
 
 Create a thing so nervous as an ant, 
 
 When Isaac, with commendable unrest. 
 
 Ordained that we should take the road again — 
 
 For it was yet three miles to Archibald's, 
 
 And one to the first pump. 
 
 They continue along the road until Archibald's 
 house comes in sight : 
 
 Little and white and high on a smooth round hill 
 It stood, with hackmatacks and apple-trees 
 Before it, and a big barn-roof beyond. 
 
 Isaac stops and gazes for a long time at a newly- 
 mown field. Rather sorry to see it, perhaps ; for is 
 he not here to tell Archibald that it is time to cut 
 his oats. He says nothing, however, but the boy 
 understands : 
 
 I was young, 
 
 But there were a few things that I could see, 
 
 And this was one of them. — "Well, well ! " said he ; 
 
 And "Archibald will be surprised, I think," 
 
 Said I. But all my childhood subtlety 
 
 Was lost on Isaac, for he strode along 
 
 Like something out of Homer — powerful 
 
 And awful on the wayside, so I thought. 
 
1 8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 That touch, "out of Homer," strikes the hidden 
 significance of the poem. To the boy, this adventure 
 is epic. These are the doings of heroes, giant- 
 men, and for a moment he is privileged to hear 
 their thoughts, which are all the more wonderful 
 to him because he cannot understand them. This 
 throwing up of the commonplace actors of the real 
 scene into the clouds of legend ; juxtaposing two 
 old men fast drawing toward senility and each 
 fearing to be the first to pass, and jealous of every 
 remaining proof of vigour in the other, with the 
 god-like figures stalking through the boy's brain, 
 makes the irony, the weird truth of the poem. 
 Archibald comes to greet them : 
 
 with one hand on his back 
 And the other clutching his huge-headed cane. 
 
 and they discuss the terrible heat, which leads to a 
 suggestion of cider, and brings in one of the most 
 beautiful descriptive passages of the poem : 
 
 Down we went. 
 
 Out of the fiery stmshine to the gloom, 
 Grateful and half sepulchral, where we found 
 The barrels, like eight potent sentinels. 
 Close ranged along the wall. From one of them 
 A bright pine spile stuck out alluringly, 
 And on the black flat stone, just under it, • 
 Glimmered a late-spiUed proof that Archibald 
 Had spoken from imfeigned experience. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 19 
 
 There was a fluted antique water-glass 
 
 Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest, 
 
 There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort 
 
 That feeds on darkness. Isaac turned him out, 
 
 And touched him with his thumb to make him jump, 
 
 And then composedly pulled out the plug 
 
 With such a practiced hand that scarce a drop 
 
 Did even touch his fingers. Then he drank 
 
 And smacked his lips with a slow patronage 
 
 And looked along the line of barrels there 
 
 With a pride that may have been forgetfulness : 
 
 "I never twist a spigot nowadays," 
 He said, and raised the glass up to the light, 
 
 "But I thank God for orchards." 
 
 The cider-drinking over, Isaac suggests that 
 Archibald and the boy wait in the shade \yhile he 
 takes a little walk — goes to the fields, in fact, al- 
 though he does not say so. So Archibald and the 
 boy sit in the orchard and the old man tells him a 
 story which drifts away into talk, talk about the 
 subject uppermost in his mind : 
 
 ' Archibald 
 
 And Isaac are old men. Remember, boy. 
 That we are old. Whatever we have gained, 
 Or lost, or thrown away, we are old men. 
 
 ■ The shadow calls us and it frightens us — " 
 Then gradually it comes out that Isaac is failing : 
 
20 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 ". . . . Yes, I have fseen it conxe 
 These eight years, and these ten years, and I know 
 Now that it cannot be for very long 
 That Isaac will be Isaac. You have seen — 
 Young as you are, you must have seen the strange 
 Uncomfortable habit of the man ? 
 He'll take my nerves and tie them in a knot 
 Sometimes, and that's not Isaac. I know that — 
 And I know what it is : I get it here 
 A little, in my knees, and Isaac — here." 
 The old man shook his head regretfully 
 And laid his knuckles three times on his forehead. 
 
 Then the poem goes on in the boy's reminiscence ; 
 
 Never shall I forget, long as I live, 
 
 The quaint thin crack in Archibald's old voice, 
 
 The lonely twinkle in his little eyes, 
 
 Or the way it made me feel to be with him. 
 
 I know I lay and looked for a long time 
 
 Down through the orchard and actr/v^ the road. 
 
 Across the river and the sun-(icorchfid hill* 
 
 That ceased in a blue forest, where the world 
 
 Ceased with it. Nov/ and then my fancy caught 
 
 A flying glimpse of a good life beyond — 
 
 Something of ships and sunlight, street* and singling, 
 
 Troy falling, and the ages coming back. 
 
 And ages coming forward : Archibald 
 
 And Isaac were good fellows in old clothes 
 
 And Agamemnon was a friend of mine ; 
 
 Ulyases coming home again to shoot 
 
Biwin Arl»M(l0H Robinson ai 
 
 With bovra and (6«ith«i«d arrows made anoth«r, 
 And all wai a» it s)\o\iId b«. I was yotuig > 
 
 A quaint, homdy toudi gives it aU i 
 
 So I lay dr«amiBg ot what thinfs I would, 
 
 Cahn and kconigibt^ satisfied 
 
 With apptes and roinai\ce and ignonnca, 
 
 And th« Skating smokt firam Ardiibald's day i^ 
 
 andlMt 
 Witiiin th« mi||^tin«ss ot tlt« T^^ite sun 
 That smote th« land around us and wraui^t out 
 A ftagraace from th« ti««s> 
 
 Ag«in ^e gmndiose vision intf^nges on fact: 
 
 Th« pT«m\t and til« {utur« and th« past, 
 I«aa« and Ardiibaldt th« burning bush, 
 T%i« Trojans and th« walk ot J^cidio, 
 Wn« beautifully ^lsed^ 
 
 But reali^ breaks down the glory : 
 
 , . « . . all w«nt well 
 Till Archibald btipn to tiret tUtr Isaa« 
 And said it was a master ^ tor «ai»trok», 
 
 Isaac returns, smnewhat upset b«muse there is 
 nothing wi^ \«Mch he can h^Hmatdy find fault. 
 Still hft must have tiie last vvord. This last vrard and 
 its le^ktion by Ardliibald are d»fmingly giv«A : 
 
22 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 "But, Archibald," 
 
 He added, with a sweet severity 
 
 That made me think of peach-sktns and goose-flesh, 
 "I'm half afraid you cut those oats of yours 
 
 A day or two before they were well set." 
 "They were set weU enough," said Archibald, — 
 
 And I remarked the process of his nose 
 
 Before the words came out. 
 
 Then the two old men settle down to a game of 
 cards, and the boy keeps tally and dreams his dreams : 
 
 So I remember ,^ even to this day. 
 Just how they sounded, how they placed themselves, 
 And how the game went on while I made marks 
 And crossed them out, and meanwhile made some Trojans. 
 Likewise I made Ulysses, after Isaac, 
 And a little after Flaxman. Archibald 
 Was wounded when he found himself left out. 
 But he had no heroics, and I said so : 
 I told him that his white beard was too long 
 And too straight down to be like things in Homer. 
 "Quite so," said Isaac. — "Low," said Archibald; 
 And he threw down a deuce with a deep grin 
 That showed his yellow teeth and made me happy. 
 So they played on till a bell rang from the door. 
 And Archibald said, "Supper." 
 
 That night, the boy dreams of his old men in the 
 guise of two old angels, sitting with palpitating 
 wings in a silver light, and as he approaches them : 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 23 
 
 . , . . . . a dry voice 
 Cried thinly, with tinpatronizing triumph, 
 "I've got you, Isaac ; high, low, jack, and the game." 
 
 The poem ends with this stanza : 
 
 Isaac and Archibald have gone their way 
 To the silence of the loved and well-forgotten. 
 I knew them, and I may have laughed at them ; 
 But there's a laughing that has honor in it. 
 And I have no regret for hght words now. 
 Rather I think sometimes they may have made 
 Their sport of me ; — but they would not do that, 
 They were too old for that. They were old men, 
 And I may laugh at them because I knew them. 
 
 The last line is typical of Mr. Robinson. "And 
 I may laugh at them because I knew them." /Does 
 the poet really laugh? Assuredly not, laughter is 
 the one emotion which he has not at command/ 
 Does it mean a sneer? Less still. The poet does 
 not sneer. The life he sees ajaout him is too solemn 
 and too sad. yl"he line is cryptic, because it really 
 means just a question, pitying, fearful, cast into space 
 to go knocking about among the stars^/ 
 
 Notice the description of a bright, hot Summer 
 day, sketched in with sure, nervous strokes : 
 
 The world 
 
 Was wide, and there was gladness everywhere. 
 
 We walked together down the River Road 
 
24 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 With all the warmth and wonder of the land 
 Around us, and the wayside flash of leaves, — 
 
 Under the scorching sun ... a smooth-cut field 
 Faint yellow in the distance. 
 
 There are many such passages throughout the 
 
 poem. But in spite of the "gladness," the sun, the 
 
 warmth, the effect is not hot and gay, not redolent 
 
 /of the unquestioning delight of boyhood, but a little 
 
 iark and chilly with mist, the mist of questioning, 
 
 'where old faith has been swept away and no new 
 
 confidence has restored the balance. /K dismherited 
 
 \ Puritan cannot suddenly turn Pagan and bask 
 
 [^contentedly under a blue sky./ And the "new 
 
 Paganism" which raises science to the emotional 
 
 level of a religion, is achieved with difficulty by one 
 
 only lately freed from the shackles of a hampering 
 
 superstition. 
 
 That Mr. Robinson is conscious of the chief cause 
 
 ( his melancholy, I think extremely doubtful. His 
 
 iper is too unscientific to lead him to a minute self- 
 
 imination, with the test-tube of atavism for a 
 
 lide. There is evidence of a greater peace of mind 
 
 in his later work, as we shall see, but even there, 
 
 "peace" is hardly the word, it is rather that his 
 
 recent poems are less mordant. He has raised for 
 
 himself a banner, and it bears upon it a single word : 
 
 "Courage." 
 
 But I am outstripping biography, and I must 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 25 
 
 return to a thoughtful little schoolboy in a Maine 
 town, learning his lessons, playing his games, and 
 storing up questions to be asked later, over and over 
 again, when they have taken shape to his more 
 mature mind. 
 
 In due course, Mr. Robinson entered the Gardiner 
 High School, and from there went on to Harvard 
 College, in 1891. He did not graduate, however, as 
 his father's ill-health forced him to leave in 1893. 
 Meanwhile, the family fortunes had waned, and the 
 young man found himself at the beginning of life 
 with very little to look to but his own efforts. 
 
 The Puritan temper is no stickler at obstacles, . 
 and Mr. Robinson bravely shouldered his destiny. } 
 Writing was the one thing he was fitted for, the one 
 thing he wanted to do. Already, in 1896, a small 
 volume of his verses had been privately printed. 
 I cannot speak of this volume, I have not been able 
 to obtain a copy, but his first published book, 
 "The Children of the Night," appeared in 1897. 
 Gardiner seemed a small horizon for one whose 
 working material was to be life, and Mr. Robinson 
 set out bravely into the world, although without 
 resources, and the world he entered into was the 
 City of New York. 
 
 We may take "The Children of the Night," 
 therefore, as containing his early work, that done 
 before the New York period. And, as such, this is 
 the moment to study it. 
 
26 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 /It must be admitted that this is one of the most 
 completely gloomy books in the whole range of 
 poetry .y The note is struck in this quatrain : 
 
 We cannot crown ourselves with everything, 
 Nor can we coax the Fates with us to quarrel : 
 
 No matter what we are, or what we sing, 
 Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel. 
 
 But no one, even picking it up at a time when the 
 poet's name was quite unknown, could have failed 
 to have been struck by its sincerity and strength. 
 There is no hint here of the artificial melancholy 
 which has become so much the fashion among youth- 
 ful aspirants to poetry. The poet is fighting his 
 sorrow, and that it masters him is due to no lack of 
 personal virility. Mr. Robinson himself is a strong 
 man, his weakness is his inheritance, that outworn 
 Puritan inheritance, no longer a tonic, but a poison, 
 sapping the springs of life at their source. , His exist- 
 |ce is one long battle between individual bravery and 
 iralyzing atavism. So the sentiments he voices are 
 >^nical, but the manner of them is sure and 
 'strong. / 
 
 The first poem in the book shows the breaking 
 down of the old belief, and the endeavour to feed 
 his life without it. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 27 
 
 THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT 
 
 For those that never know the light, 
 
 The darkness is a sullen thing ; 
 And they, the Children of the Night, 
 
 Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing. 
 
 I But some are strong and some are weak, — 
 1 And there's the story. House and home 
 Are shut from countless hearts that seek 
 World-refuge that will never come. 
 
 And if there be no other life, 
 
 And if there be no other chance 
 To weigh their sorrow and their strife 
 
 Than in the scales of circumstance, 
 
 'Twere better, ere the sun go down 
 
 Upon the first day we embark, 
 In life's imbittered sea to drown. 
 
 Than saU forever in the dark. 
 
 But if there be a soul on earth 
 
 So blinded with its own misuse 
 Of man's revealed, incessant worth, 
 
 Or worn with anguish, that it views 
 
 No light but for a mortal eye, 
 
 No rest but of a mortal sleep, 
 No God but in a prophet's lie. 
 
 No faith for "honest doubt" to keep; 
 
28 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 If there be nothing, good or bad, 
 But chaos for a soul to trust, — 
 
 God counts it for a soul gone mad, 
 And if God be God, He is just. 
 
 And if God be God, He is Love ; 
 
 And though the Dawn be still so dim. 
 It shows us we have played enough 
 
 With creeds that make a fiend of Him. 
 
 There is one creed, and only one. 
 That glorifies God's excellence ; 
 
 So cherish, that His will be done. 
 The common creed of common sense. 
 
 It is the crimson, not the gray. 
 That charms the twilight of all time ; 
 
 It is the promise of the day 
 
 That makes the starry sky sublime ; 
 
 ; It is the faith within the fear 
 ' That holds us to the Uf e we curse ; — 
 So let us in ourselves revere 
 The Self which is the Universe ! 
 
 Let us, the Children of the Night, 
 Put off the cloak that hides the scar ! 
 
 Let us be Children of the Light, 
 And tell the ages what we are ! 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 29 
 
 As a poem, that is far less important than others in 
 the volume, but as a psychological note, it is in- 
 valuable. 
 
 The true vigour of the book, however, the dom- 
 inant chord, is chiefly to be found in the objec- 
 tive sketches q £ person a lit ies w hi ch it contain o; 
 
 Mr. Robinson preceded Mr. Masters in short 
 pictures of men's lives. The unconscious cynicism 
 I have spoken of is in them, but sometimes (unlike 
 Mr. Masters) something more. 
 
 JOHN EVERELDOWN 
 
 "Where axe you going to-night, to-night, — 
 Where are you going, John Evereldown ? 
 
 There's never the sign of a star in sight. 
 Nor a lamp that's nearer than Tilbury Town. 
 
 Why do you stare as a dead man might ? 
 
 Where are you pointing away from the Ught ? 
 
 And where are you going to-night, to-night, — 
 Where are you going, John Evereldown?" 
 
 "Right through the forest, where none can see, 
 There's where I'm going, to Tilbury Town. 
 
 The men are asleep, — or awake, may be, — 
 But the women are calling John Evereldown. ' 
 
 Ever and ever they call for me. 
 
 And while they call can a man be free ? 
 
 So right through the forest, where none can see. 
 There's where I'm going, to Tilbury Town." 
 
30 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 "But why are you going so late, so late, — 
 Why are you going, John Evereldown ? 
 
 Though the road be smooth and the path be straight 
 There are two long leagues to Tilbury Town. 
 
 Come in by the fire, old man, and wait ! 
 
 Why do you chatter out there by the gate ? 
 
 And why are you going so late, so late, — 
 Why are you going, John Evereldown ? " 
 
 "I follow the women wherever they call, — 
 
 That's why I'm going to Tilbiuy Town. 
 
 God knows if I pray to be done with it all, 
 
 But God is no friend to John Evereldown. 
 So the clouds may come and the rain may fall. 
 The shadows may creep and the dead men crawl, — 
 But I follow the women wherever they call, 
 And that's why I'm going to Tilbury Town." 
 
 Again, in this poem, Mr. Robinson has recourse to 
 the ballad technique. The repetition of the last 
 'word in the first line gives it at once. The simplicity 
 of the ballad manner covering an acute psychological 
 analysis is one of Mr. Robinson's favourite turns, 
 and it certainly heightens the force of the criticism, 
 growing as it does out of quaintness./ It gives a 
 grotesque quality to the work, and sharpens the 
 edge of tragedy. 
 
 Another vignette, more subtle, more ironical, is 
 "Richard Cory." 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 31 
 
 RICHARD CORY 
 
 Whenever Richard Cory went down town, 
 We people on the pavement looked at him ; 
 He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 
 Clean favoured, and imperially slim. 
 
 And he was always quietly arrayed, 
 And he was always human when he talked ; 
 But stiU he fluttered pulses when he said, 
 "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. 
 
 And he was rich, — yes, richer 'than a king, — 
 And admirably schooled in every grace : 
 In fine, we thought that he was everything 
 To make us wish that we were in his place. 
 
 So on we worked, and waited for the light. 
 And went without the meat, and cursed the bread ; 
 And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 
 Went home and put a bullet through his head. 
 
 In reading Mr. Robinson, it is always necessary to 
 note the almost unapproachable technique with which 
 his poems are wrought. /He employs the most com- 
 plete reticence, he permits himself no lapses from 
 straightforward speech to force a glittering effect./ 
 But the effect is never commonplace, never even 
 unpoetic. It is indeed art concealing art. So 
 admirable is his technique, that not only do we get 
 
32 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 the essence of poetry in these astringent poems, we 
 rget drama. In four words, "one calm summer 
 night," is set a background for the tragedy which 
 brings the bullet shot crashing across our ear-drums 
 with the shock of an earthquake. They appear 
 simple, these poems ; and they are really so im- 
 mensely difficult. / Mr. Robinson has carefully 
 studied that primary condition of all poetry : brevity ; 
 and his best effects are those gained wfth the utmost 
 economy of means. / 
 
 A moment ago, I referred to the grotesque note 
 in these poems, and grotesque they often are. 
 Weird — dour — a harsh, ghostly reverberation 
 struck by a line. In "John Evereldown " is this 
 picture : 
 
 So the clouds may come and the rain may fall, 
 The shadows may creep and the dead men crawl. 
 
 That has the slimy horror of coffin-worms about it. 
 This, from "The Pity of Leaves," is also ghostly, 
 but more subtly, spiritually, so : 
 
 The brown, thin leaves on the stones outside 
 Skipped with a freezing whisper. Now and then 
 They stopped, and stayed there — just to let him know 
 How dead they were. 
 
 In one poem, he writes : 
 
 Trellises lie like bones in a ruin that once was a garden. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 33 
 
 In "Stafford's Cabin," "something happened here 
 before my memory began;" what, no one knows. 
 But 
 
 We found it in the morning with an iron bar behind, 
 And there were chains around it. 
 
 So slight, yet so sharp, are these touches, it never 
 seems as though the poet were conscious of. them. 
 He knows how to inject them into the context, by 
 
 -accident, as it were. /This creating an atmosphere 
 with a back-hand stroke is one of the most personal 
 
 Land peculiar traits of Mr. Robinson's style. Such 
 passages blow across his pages like mists from the 
 grey valley of the Styx.. / 
 
 I have spoken of Mr. Robinson's "unconscious 
 cynicism." It is unconscious because he never 
 dwells upon it as such, never delights in it, nor 
 wraps it comfortably about him. It is hardly more 
 than the reverse of the shield of pain, and in his later 
 work, it gives place to a great, pitying tenderness. 
 Even in this first book, there is the hint of the 
 "something more " : 
 
 CLIFF KLINGENHAGEN ; 
 
 Cliff Klingenhagen had me in to dine 
 With him one day ; and after soup and meat. 
 And all the other things there were to eat. 
 Cliff took two glasses and filled one with wine 
 
34 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 And one with wormwood. Then, without a sign 
 For me to choose at all, he took the draught 
 Of bitterness himself, and lightly quaffed 
 It off, and said the other one was mine. 
 
 And when I asked him what the deuce he meant 
 By doing that, he only looked at me 
 And grinned, and said it was a way of his. 
 And though I know the fellow, I have spent 
 Long time a-wondering when I shall be 
 As happy as Cliff Klingenhagen is. 
 
 "Success through failure," that is the motto on 
 the other side of his banner of "Courage." It is 
 true that he carries the doctrine almost too far. So 
 far that it nearly lapses into Nirvana. But one 
 must never forget that to him it is a symbol of a 
 protest against brutal, unfeeling materialism. 
 
 The stark sincerity and simplicity of this book must 
 have had the effect of a galvanic shock upon the small 
 compauiy of readers who stumbled upon it. But the 
 times were not yet ripe for such poetry, and it was 
 to be years yet before Mr. Robinson received his due. 
 
 Meanwhile he struggled along in New York, a poet 
 writing twenty years too soon. Poetry is not a pay- 
 ing pursuit at any time, and Mr. Robinson did many 
 things to keep the life going which was to make the 
 poetry. History has a number of stories which tell 
 of genius struggling against poverty and lack of 
 recognition in the midst of a busy, callous city. Mr. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 35 
 
 Robinson's early life is the same twice-told tale, but 
 though he seemed to fail, he abundantly succeeded. 
 For he was writing all the time, and we who have 
 the poems can measure the outcome. 
 
 So five years passed before the next volume of 
 poems was issued, "Captain Craig," published in 
 1902. The re-issue, bearing the date 191 5, has 
 on the title-page the legend, "Revised Edition, with 
 Additional Poems," but we shall deal with this 
 revised edition here, as the main content of the book, 
 is undoubtedly of the earlier date. 
 
 It is quite evident, in examining this book, that 
 the five years of silence had not been without fruit. 
 Already, there is a surer touch and a deeper-probing 
 psychology. The excessive stfBjefcti^ity of "The 
 Children of the Night " is making way for an interest 
 in the world outside of the poet. Although the first 
 book contained many sketches of character, we feel 
 that the interpretation of these characters is very 
 much tinged by the author's personality. /To the 
 end, Mr. Robinson never succeeds in completely 
 omitting the writer from the thing written, even in 
 intentionally objective and dramatic pieces, but 
 each volume of poems is an advance in this respect/ 
 
 Here, again, I must deflect misunderstanding by 
 hastening to add that of course no work of art can 
 be (or should be) purely objective. An author's 
 personality determines even his choice of subject, to 
 say nothing of its manner of presentation, but there 
 
36 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 is a great diflference between the reflections and 
 shadows cast by a personaHty, and that personality 
 thrust, a solid body, in front of a window. A man 
 reveals himself by every sentence he utters in con- 
 versation ; but he does more than reveal himself, he 
 obscures everything else, when his conversation 
 revolves about the pronoun "I." 
 
 In Mr. Robinson's case, it would seem that a 
 self-centred and analytical boy is gradually giving 
 place to a mature and kindly man of the world. The 
 French critic, Remy de Gourmont, in his famous 
 book of criticism, "Le Livre des Masques," often 
 epitomizes an author's whole work in a fancied 
 scene. This method applies peculiarly well to the 
 Mr. Robinson of the later books. /Let us suppose a 
 man, mellowed, resigned, but a little seared withal, 
 a kindly monk fled from the world after a large 
 experience, sitting in his monastery, telling tales of 
 old events, not judging, not extenuating, disillu- 
 sioned, and calm because he has stamped so long 
 upon the fires within him that now, for the most 
 part, they burn quietly, obedient to control. He 
 talks kindly, bringing up out of his past much that 
 is interesting, some things that are terrifying. But 
 he turns it all aside with a quiet smile. It is so long 
 ago. There was really much to be said on the other 
 side. It is over for him ; these are only memories, 
 you understand./ 
 
 Such might be the picture these last books call up. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 37 
 
 The most important poem in "Captain Craig" is 
 not, to my mind, the title poem, but "Isaac and 
 Archibald," which I quoted a few moments ago. 
 "Captain Craig" is a dreary, philosophical ramble, 
 occupying eighty-four pages, which, in spite of the 
 excellent manipulation of its blank verse, reveals a 
 fault which the earlier volunie is conspicuously! 
 "without, namely, verbosity. The one fault which 
 has grown upon Mr. Robinson with the years is a 
 tendency to long-windedness. / There is an intermi-] 
 nable amount of talking in " Captain Craig," and one 
 must admit that the talking is both involved and dull. 
 
 The poem is built upon that favourite theory of 
 the poet's : the success of failure. But here it is 
 pushed too far, to the verge of the ridiculous, in fact. 
 Captain Craig is an old wanderer, peddlar, beggar, 
 what you please, drifted into Tilbury Town, and 
 kept alive, and (alas !) talking, by the charity of four 
 young men, who seem to find a solace in his conversa- 
 tion which the specimens of it given make it difficult 
 to understand. When one of the group goes upon a 
 journey. Captain Craig writes to him in this wise : 
 
 "Since last I wrote — and I fear the weeks have gone 
 Too long for me to leave my gratitude 
 Unuttered for its own acknowledgement — 
 I have won, without the magic of Amphion, 
 Without the songs of Orpheus or Apollo, 
 The frank regard — and with it, if you like, 
 The fledged respect — of three quick-footed friends. 
 
38 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 (' Nothing is there more marvelous than man,' 
 Said Sophocles ; and I say after him : 
 ' He traps and captures, all-inventive one. 
 The light birds and the creatures of the wold, 
 And in his nets the fishes of the sea.') 
 Once they were pictures, painted on the air, 
 Faint with eternal color, colorless, — 
 But now they are not pictures, they are fowls. 
 
 "At first they stood aloof and cocked their small, 
 Smooth, prudent heads at me and made as if, 
 With a cryptic idiotic melancholy. 
 To look authoritative and sagacious ; 
 But when I tossed a piece of apple to them. 
 They scattered back with a discord of short squawks 
 And then came forward with a craftiness 
 That made me think of Eden. Atropos 
 Came first, and having grabbed the morsel up. 
 Ran flapping far away and out of sight, 
 With Clotho and Lachesis hard after her ; 
 But finally the three fared all alike, 
 And the next day I persuaded them with com. 
 In a week they came and had it from my fingers 
 And looked up at me while I pinched their bills 
 And made them sneeze. Count Pretzel's Carmichael 
 Had said they were not ordinary Birds 
 At all, — and they are not ; they are the Fates, 
 Foredoomed of their own insuflSciency 
 To be assimilated. — Do not think, 
 Because in my contented isolation 
 It suits me at this time to be jocose, 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 39 
 
 That I am nailing reason to the cross, 
 Or that I set the bauble and the bells 
 Above the crucible ; for I do nought, 
 Say nought, but with an ancient levity 
 That is the forbear of all earnestness." 
 
 There is not one letter, there are three, and they 
 occupy thirty-one pages of the poem. The traveller 
 returns to find Captain Craig dying, but the same 
 kind of conversation continues from his death-bed 
 until the moment of his demise. The purport of all 
 this speech seems to be that the garrulous old man 
 has a kinship with the spheres which is denied to more 
 efficient folk, but his vague, windy utterances hardly 
 bear out this contention. One line, however, is 
 true, truer than there is any reason to suppose that 
 Captain Craig meant it to be. Speaking to the 
 youths at his bedside, the old man says : "Tl^e truth 
 is yours, God's universe is yours. ..." ^/f'or cer- 
 tainly the universe belongs to those who are willing to 
 live in it and be amenable to its laws, rather than to 
 those who are content to withdraw themselves aside 
 and merely speculate upon its genesis and meaning/' 
 
 Other authors have painted derelicts who have 
 gained wisdom through much contemplajtion, real 
 wisdom which we acknowledge to be sound, but in 
 "Captain Craig" Mr. Robinson's craft has played 
 him false. /His technique is here, beautiful as 
 always, but his content is neither convincing, dra- 
 matic, nor interesting. , 
 
40 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 "Captain Craig," as a volume, contains other 
 excellent poems beside "Isaac and Archibald." 
 "Aunt Imogen" is an interesting and tender 
 study of the unmarried woman ; it is the tragedy 
 of the maiden aunt, so typical, unhappily, of New 
 England. "The Book of Annandale" is a less ac- 
 curate sketch of second marriage, approached first 
 from the man's point of view and then from the 
 woman's. A few lyrics, some sonnets, and a 
 number of adaptations from the Greek, make up 
 the book. Of the latter, this quotation will serve 
 to show the poet's suggestive, ironically humor- 
 ous touch : 
 
 A MIGHTY RUNNER 
 
 (Nicharchus) 
 
 The day when Charmus ran with five 
 In Arcady, as I'm alive, 
 He came in seventh. — "Five and one 
 Make seven, you say? It can't be done." — 
 WeU, if you think it needs a note, 
 A friend in a fur overcoat 
 Ran with him, crying all the while, 
 "You'll beat 'em, Charmus, by a mUe !" 
 And so he came in seventh. 
 Therefore, good Zoilus, you see 
 The thing is plain as plain can be ; 
 And with four more for company, 
 He would have been eleventh. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 During this part of Mr. Robinson's career, Color 
 heodore Roosevelt, then President of the Unit 
 :ates, became interested in his work, and, in igc 
 Fered him a position in the New York Custc 
 ouse. Mr. Robinson, with characteristic modesi 
 leaks of himself as " the least efficient public serva 
 ho ever drew his pay from the United Sta1 
 reasury Department," an estimate which we shot 
 ceive with a grain of salt, as he held the positi 
 r five years, relinquishing it in 1910, the sai 
 ;ar which saw the publication of his third boc 
 r jie Town Dow n the River." 
 This volume contains, beside the title poem 
 isty lyric of future and change, with a slight c 
 mistic note which is absent in his earlier wor] 
 iree studies of public characters : Lincoln, Naj 
 on, and Theodore Roosevelt. Of these, the Lincc 
 the most successful. /The truth is that IV 
 obinson is too Individual a man, too wrapt up in ] 
 ^rn reactions, to be a good mouthpiece for otl 
 idividual men not of his creating. / His Napole 
 3em bears the title, "An Island," and is a moi 
 igue placed in the mouth of the dying Emper 
 ut the man who speaks is not in the least li 
 apoleon, these are not Napoleon's though t-p: 
 jsses. This is no character study ; perhaps it v 
 jt an attempt at one. Call it a poem upon 
 naginative theme, and it has some fine passage 
 
42 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 He tells me that great kings look very small 
 When they are put to bed. 
 
 Or: 
 
 Flags that are vanished, flags that are soiled and furled, 
 
 Say what wiU be the word when I am gone : 
 
 What learned little acrid archive men 
 
 Will burrow to find me out and burrow again. 
 
 "Little acrid archive men" is magnificent irony. 
 But this querulous, puling invalid is not the dying 
 Napoleon, as any student of the last days at Saint 
 Helena can readily testify. 
 
 The poem on Mr. Roosevelt is called "The 
 Revealer," and sounds strangely in this Year of our 
 Lord, 1917. 
 
 In dealing with Lincoln, Mr. Robinson had the 
 body of a great tradition to help him. It may be 
 objected that Napoleon is as much a tradition as 
 Lincoln, but the answer is simply — not to the 
 average American. Possibly Mr. Robinson has 
 not made an exhaustive study of Napoleon ; in 
 the case of Lincoln, no exhaustive study was neces- 
 sary, he imbibed understanding with the air of his 
 native town. The poem is fine, not so fine as Mr. 
 Fletcher's on the same theme, but strong, reticent, 
 and noble. 
 
\ 
 
 Edwin Arlingibn Robinson 43 
 
 THE MASTER 
 
 (Lincoln) 
 
 A flsdng word from here and there "^ ■) 
 Had sown the name at which we sneered,;' ^*~' 
 But soon the name was eversrwhere, '^^ 
 To be reviled and then revered : "v>^ 
 A presence to be loved and feared, Xf-^ 
 We cannot hide it, or deny C*- 
 
 That we, the gentlemen who jeered, -V" 
 May be forgotten by and by. (V^ 
 
 C^ 
 He came when days were perilous . 
 
 And hearts of men were sore beguiled ; ' " 
 
 And having made his note of us, ' '' 
 
 He pondered and was reconciled. . ^~ 
 
 Was ever master yet so mild -^ 
 
 As he, and so untamable ? ^ 
 
 We doubted, even when he smiled, '■■>— 
 
 Not knowing what he knew so well. A. 
 
 He knew that undeceiving fate 
 Would shame us whom he served unsought ; %- 
 He knew that he must wince and wait — ^- 
 The jest of those for whom he fought ; Ar^ 
 He knew devoutly what he thought ^^" 
 
 Of us and of our ridicule ; C — 
 
 He knew that we must all be taught Mj- 
 Like little children in a school. n 
 
44 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 We gave a glamour to the task 
 
 That he encountered and saw through, 
 
 But little of us did he ask, 
 
 And little did we ever do. 
 
 And what appears if we review 
 
 The season when we railed and chaffed ? 
 
 It is the face of one who knew 
 
 That we were learning while we laughed. 
 
 The face that in our vision feels 
 Again the venom that we flung, 
 Transfigured to the world reveals 
 The vigilance to which we clung. 
 Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among 
 The mysteries that are untold. 
 The face we see was never young 
 Nor could it ever have been old. 
 
 For he, to whom we had applied 
 Our shopman's test of age and worth, 
 Was elemental when he died, 
 As he was ancient at his birth : 
 The saddest among kings of earth. 
 Bowed with a galling crown, this man 
 Met rancor with a cryptic mirth. 
 Laconic — and Olsmipian. 
 
 The love, the grandeur, and the fame 
 Are bounded by the world alone ; 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 45 
 
 The calm, the smouldering, and the flame 
 Of awful patience were his own : 
 With him they are forever flown 
 Past all our fond self -shadowings, 
 Wherewith we cumber the Unknown 
 As with inept, Icarian wings. 
 
 For we were not as other men : 
 'Twas ours to soar and his to see. 
 But we are coming down again. 
 And we shall come down pleasantly ; 
 Nor shall we longer disagree 
 On what it is to be subHme, 
 But flourish in our perigee 
 And have one Titan at a time. 
 
 One of the most characteristfc sections of the book 
 is/di group of poems entitled "Calverley's," and here 
 again we have the short character vignettes/(vhich 
 gave so much distinction to "The Children of the 
 Night." Calverley's is a tavern, and the host and 
 its principal frequenters are drawn with Mr. Robin- 
 son's sympathetic, clear understanding. There are 
 two other sketches, however, which I think sur- 
 pass them. This, of a billiard expert : 
 
 DOCTOR OF BILLIARDS 
 
 Of all among the fallen from on high. 
 We count you last and leave you to regain 
 Your bom dominion of a life made vain 
 
46 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 By three spheres of insidious ivory. 
 You dwindle to the lesser tragedy — 
 Content, you say. We call, but you remain. 
 Nothing aHve gone wrong could be so plain, 
 Or quite so blasted with absurdity. 
 You click away the kingdom that is yours. 
 And you click off your crown for cap and bells ; 
 You smile, who are still master of the feast. 
 And for your smile we credit you the least ; 
 But when your false, unhallowed laugh occurs, 
 We seem to think there may be something else. 
 
 and this masterpiece of brevity and horror : 
 
 HOW ANNANDALE WENT OUT 
 
 They called it Annandale — and I was there 
 
 To flourish, to find words, and to attend : 
 
 Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend, 
 
 I Watched him ; and the sight was not so fair 
 
 As one or two that I have seen elsewhere : 
 
 An apparatus not for me to mend — 
 
 A wreck, with hell between him and the end, 
 
 Remained of Annandale ; and I was there. 
 
 I knew the ruin as I knew the man ; 
 
 So put the two together, if you can. 
 
 Remembering the worst you know of me. 
 
 Now view yourself as I was, on the spot — 
 
 With a slight kind of engine. Do you see ? 
 
 Like this . . . You wouldn't hang me ? I thought not. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 47 
 
 There is one curious mannerism in Mr. Robinson's 
 work, and one which is the absolute opposite of the 
 -ballad quality of which he is at times so fond. /This 
 mannerism consists in the obscuring of a thing under 
 aiL.egithet^^ more or less artificial and difficultr of 
 comgr^lfinaon./ In "Doctor of Billiards" he de- 
 scribes the billiard balls as "three spheres of insidious 
 ivory." In "Miniver Cheevy," he refers to armour 
 in this wise : 
 
 Miniver cursed the commonplace 
 And eyed a khaki suit with loathing ; 
 
 He missed the mediaeval grace 
 Of iron clothing. 
 
 In another poem, he mentions one of the characteris- 
 tics of a gentleman as : 
 
 His index of adagios. 
 
 The most extravagant case of this sort, however, is/ 
 in "How Annandale Went Out," where he speaks of^ 
 the hypodermic syringe as "a slightJoruLof^engine/j 
 In less skilful hands, such a mannerism would be 
 unbearable, but /Mr. Robinson often manages to 
 convey with it a,mibtle-S3aiibolism, to underlay the 
 fact of his poem with a cogent meaning, tragic, 
 ironic, cynical, what he pleases./' Doubtless the 
 method contains hidden germs of danger; it may 
 easily degenerate into artificiality. But, so far, 
 
48 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Mr. Robinson has not allowed it to degenerate, and 
 employed as he employs it, it is valuable. 
 
 Fine though much of this book is, it seems more a 
 maintaining of a position than a definite advance. 
 The leap forward was not to come until six years 
 later, with "The Man Against the Sky." 
 
 In the interval, Mr. Robinson turned his atten- 
 tion to plays, the first of which, "Van Zom," appear- 
 ing in 1914, and the second, "The Porcupine," in 1915. 
 
 It is always a dreary task to-i ecmtl'me lapses of 
 enius, and/t is as lapses from his usual high achieve- 
 
 ent that Mr. Robinson's plays must be considered/ 
 another man, they would merit praise for their 
 iincerity and effort, but they fall much below the 
 'fevel of accomplishment of the poet's other work, and, 
 coming from his pen, they must be considered, as 
 failures. 
 
 /To be sure, "Van Zom" is quite unlike any other 
 may, and in these days of facile playwriting, that 
 /alone is a distinction. But a play certainly should 
 be dramatic above all other things, and dramatic 
 "Van Zorn" is not. The play depends rather upon 
 hints of a drama carried on in the actor's minds than 
 upon anything the audience actually sees or hears. 
 The dialogue is pleasant, easy, colloquial, rather 
 than brilliant ; it stays on the same agreeable level, 
 neither mounting nor sinking. So far as it and the 
 action are concerned, the play is one of half tones. 
 The swift vigour of the author's character poems is 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 49 
 
 completely lacking. Those brief, virile dramas 
 scattered throughout his books have lent no cutting 
 edge to this long play. It is diluted, thinned to a 
 mere essence, and strangely enough, realism has 
 also fled, for neither plot nor characters bear the 
 stamp of life. 
 
 One reason for this vagueness of the actual actors 
 lies in the fact that behind all they do and say is the 
 ■■real drama, and the hero of it is Fate. "-4t is Fatt 
 who shakes the lives of the characters into" plaCl 
 and will not be denied ; and it is this suggestion o: 
 brooding Fate which gives the play its peculiar' 
 atmosphere. Van Zorn is chosen as the interpreter 
 of this Fate. He is at once its tool, and its avenging 
 sword. He is constantly referred to as "a sort of 
 Flying Dutchman," though why the poet has chosen 
 the Flying Dutchman rather than any other fateful 
 character it is hard to determine. In fine. Van Zorn 
 is a very inconclusive personality. The uncanny 
 element is not brought out with sufficient skill, he is 
 shadowy as a man and vague as an instrument. 
 The most successful person in the play is the painter, 
 Famham, who is at least of real flesh and blood. It 
 is a pity that Mr. Robinson felt obliged to add at 
 touch of what theatrical managers call "comic 
 relief," in the person of Otto Mink. Mr. Robinson 
 is not happy when he attempts light humour. The 
 remarks of this character are often laboured, and 
 impede the action of the play. 
 
50 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The second play, "The Porcupine," has even less 
 to recommend it. The slightly supernatural light 
 which dimmed the crudities of "Van Zorn" and lent 
 it a suggestion of unseen possibilities, is absent here. 
 "The Porcupine" reads like the work of a youth, 
 unversed in the technique of the world and also of 
 i the theatre. The plot is confused and extraor- 
 dinarily unlikely. It concerns the return of a 
 wanderer to his step-brother's house in apparent 
 poverty and real affluence. This gentleman has 
 heard rumours to the effect that his step-brother is 
 making love to a neighbour's wife, and he has come 
 home to set matters straight. This he does by brib- 
 ing the lady to leave her husband and the country- 
 side forever, fondly hoping that her departure will 
 lead to a union of the injured husband and his (the 
 benefactor's) sister, who was jilted by this same man 
 years before. The credulous wanderer is congratulat- 
 ing himself upon his success, even with the task 
 before him of reconciling his step-brother and his 
 st ep-broth£ fV¥(ife (the Porcupine), when the latter 
 informs him that her child is really his also. The 
 optimist, nothing daunted, announces that now he, 
 she, and their child will live together in complete 
 happiness, apparently oblivious to the condition of 
 his step-brother, bereft of wife and mistress on the 
 same day, when the wife, with a clearer sense of 
 values, puts an end to an impossible situation by 
 poisoning herself. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 51 
 
 .^ The play is a bookish production, compounded of 
 Reactions from Russian and German dramatists, but 
 it lacks the starlTreality^iich brings those authors 
 to success. The straligest thing about it is its im- 
 maturity, and one asks whether it is, after all, 
 merely an old work resurrected. 
 
 Whatever Mr. Robinson's accomplishment in his 
 preceding books, there can be no doubt of the high 
 position he holds in American poetry when we exam- 
 ine "The Man Against the Sky," p iihliphprl in 
 
 1916. It would seem as though his previous-books 
 were merely working up to this achievement, so 
 far beyond them is this volume. A little book of 
 one hundred and forty-nine pages, and yet, in read- 
 ing it, /One experiences a sensation akin to that of 
 the man who opens a jar of compressed air. , It is a 
 profound wonder that so much can have been forced 
 into so small a space. For "The Man Against 
 the Sky" is dynamic with experience and knowledge 
 of life. 
 
 In the twenty years which have elapsed since the 
 publication of "The Children of the Night," we have 
 seen Mr. Robinson's entire production to consist of 
 four volumes of verse and two plays. Each volume is 
 slim and reticent, and yet small as is the bulk of the 
 work to make up the quota of the best years of a 
 man's life. In it the poet has achieved the result of 
 putting before us a personality of original thought, 
 of original expression, and quietly and unobtrusively 
 
52 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 making that personality a force in present-day 
 literature. 
 
 If we take the poetic currents in evidence in 
 America to-day, we shall find certain distinct streams 
 which, although commingling, keep on the whole very 
 
 "much to themselves. The strange thing about 
 Mr. Robinson's work is that it seems to belong to 
 none of these streams. And yet no one reading 
 these poems would feel justified in calling him not 
 
 Skmodern. ^The truth is that they are modern because 
 they are universal./' The scenes, the conversations, 
 are modern ; were the poet writing in the fifteenth 
 century, these accessories would differ, but the con- 
 tent would be as modern in one age as another, 
 because the essential quality of humanity does not 
 change ; men clothe their philosophy in different 
 terms, the philosophies even may vary, but human 
 nature does not vary, and/Mr. Robinson deals with 
 something which may fitly be called raw human 
 nature — not crude human nature, but human 
 nature simple, direct, and as it is. / 
 
 Those last three words contain the gist of the matter. 
 In them lies Mr. Robinson's gift to the "new poe- 
 
 "try" : Simple, direct, and as it is. Mr. Robinson's 
 modernity is unconcerned with forms, he has been 
 tempted by no metrical experiments. It is in keep- 
 ing with his serious outlook upon life that he is 
 content to forge his stem poems out of existing 
 material. Writing at a time when mellifluous verse 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 53 
 
 s the fashion, he made no compromise with popular 
 ;te. He was a pioneer of hard, clear sincerity, 
 dislikes inversions as much as do the Imagists, 
 i to him is due one of the earliest returns to the 
 [uence of the spoken phrase. 
 [ have said that reticence is the keynote of Mr. 
 ibinson's work. His poems are astringent. Yet, 
 the poet permits himself very few lyric outbursts, 
 
 As upward through her dream he fares 
 Half clouded with a crimson fall 
 Of roses thrown on marble stairs 
 
 3ves that this astringency is of design. 
 "The Man Against the Sky" (a symbolic title of 
 ;at beauty) is curiously named from the last 
 em in the book. Why it is the last is evident, 
 ■ it is a serious argument against a materialistic 
 planation of the universe, and bears with it a sense 
 finality which forbids its being followed by any 
 ler poems. The picture of the man silhouetted 
 ainst a bright, sunsetting sky, is very fine : 
 
 Between me and? the sunset, like a dome 
 
 Against the glory of a world on fire, 
 
 Now burned a sudden hill, 
 
 Bleak, round, and high, by fiame-lit height made higher, 
 
 With nothing on it for the flame to kill 
 
 Save one who moved and was alone up there 
 
 To loom before the chaos and the glare 
 
 As if he were the last god going home 
 
 Unto his last desire. 
 
54 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 These lines strike the tone of the whole poem : 
 High Seriousness. No other poet in America to-day 
 has this power of -4iigh_seriousoess in so marked a 
 degree as Mr. Robinson, /^e have only to compare 
 this poem with "The Children of the Night" to find 
 how far Mr. Robinson has travelled, in twenty years, 
 toward the peace which he is seeking. The bitter- 
 ne^ of change is passing ; in its stead, glimmers_t]ie_ 
 dim hope of a new order. / 
 
 "The Man Against die Sky" is a remarkable 
 poem, but as a work of art, it is hardly so original 
 or so interesting as the other long poem in the volume, 
 "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." 
 At last Mr. Robinson has flung off himself. Here is 
 another man speaking, absolutely another man, not 
 a projection of one or another portion of the poet's 
 ego. This work is as successful in its portrayal of a 
 character, two characters, as "An Island" was 
 unsuccessful. I can recall no imaginative work on 
 Shakespeare half so real and alive as this. And the 
 two characters of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in 
 juxtaposition are sharply contrasted. A plague on 
 the Baconians, this poem should silence them for- 
 ever ! I verily believe that this is Shakespeare to 
 the life, if it is not it ought to be. 
 
 This must be 
 
 our man Shakespeare, who alone of us 
 Will put an ass's head in Fairyland 
 As he would add a shilling to more shillings. 
 All most harmoniously. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 55 
 
 It is so excellent, this poem, that one reads it over 
 and over again, with growing interest each time. 
 The Unes run off as easily as conversation, proving 
 Mr. Robinson a rare technician. The words never 
 stand out of the poem to show how well chosen they 
 are, but the whole is as vigorous as everyday talk. 
 The last line: 
 
 " O Lord, that House in Stratford ! " 
 
 keeps the note of vigour to the end, finishes the poem 
 on a crashing major chord, as it were, and makes 
 the pathos of it much more pathetic because quite 
 unsentimental. 
 
 But these are only two poems in a remarkable book. 
 The volume opens with "Flammonde," and here the 
 change from the poet's early work is very evident. 
 /There is a mellowness of soul, a gentle commisera- 
 tion for the follies of the world,/which has banished 
 the acrid denunciation of such poems as "John 
 Evereldown" or "Richard Cory." 
 
 FLAMMONDE 
 
 The man Flammonde, from God knows where, 
 
 With firin address and foreign air. 
 
 With news of nations in his talk 
 
 And something royal in his walk. 
 
 With glint of iron in his eyes, 
 
 But never doubt, nor yet surprise. 
 
56 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Appeared, and stayed, and held his head 
 As one by kings accredited. 
 
 Erect, with his alert repose 
 About him, and about his clothes, 
 He pictured all tradition hears 
 Of what we owe to fifty years. 
 His cleansing heritage of taste 
 Paraded neither want nor waste ; 
 And what he needed for his fee 
 To live, he borrowed graciously. 
 
 He never told us what he was. 
 Or what mischance, or other cause. 
 Had banished him from better days 
 To play the Prince of Castaways. 
 Meanwhile he played surpassing well 
 A part, for most, unplayable ; 
 In fine, one pauses, half afraid 
 To say for certain that he played. 
 
 For that, one may as well forego 
 Conviction as to yes or no ; 
 Nor can I say just how intense 
 Would then have been the difference 
 To several, who, having striven 
 In vain to get what he was given, 
 Would see the stranger taken on 
 By friends not easy to be won. 
 
 Moreover, many a malcontent 
 He soothed and found munificent ; 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 57 
 
 His courtesy beguiled and foiled 
 -Suspicion that his years were soUed ; 
 His mien distinguished any crowd, 
 His credit strengthened when he bowed ; 
 And women, young and old, were fond 
 Of looking at the man Flammonde. 
 
 There was a woman in our town 
 On whom the fashion was to frown ; 
 But whUe our talk renewed the tinge 
 Of a long-faded scarlet fringe, 
 The man Flammonde saw none of that, 
 And what he saw we wondered at — 
 That none of us, in her distress, 
 Could hide or find our littleness. 
 
 There was a boy that all agreed 
 
 Had shut within him the rare seed 
 
 Of learning. We could understand, 
 
 But none of us could lift a hand. 
 
 The man Flammonde appraised the youth. 
 
 And told a few of us the truth ; 
 
 And thereby, for a httle gold, 
 
 A flowered future was unrolled. 
 
 There were two citizens who fought 
 For years and years, and over nought ; 
 They made life awkward for their friends. 
 And shortened their own dividends. 
 The man Flammonde said what was wrong 
 Should be made right ; nor was it long 
 
58 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Before they were again in line, 
 And had. each other in to dine. 
 
 And these I mention are but four 
 Of many out of many more. 
 So much for them. But what of him — 
 So firm in every look and limb ? 
 What small satanic sort of kink 
 Was in his brain? What broken link 
 Withheld him from the destinies 
 That came so near to being his ? 
 
 What was he, when we came to sift 
 His meaning, and to note the drift 
 Of incommimicable ways 
 That make us ponder while we praise ? 
 Why was it that his charm revealed 
 Somehow the surface of a shield ? 
 What was it that we never caught ? 
 What was he, and what was he not ? 
 
 How much it was of him we met 
 We cannot ever know ; nor yet 
 Shall all he gave us quite atone 
 For what was his, and his alone ; 
 Nor need we now, since he knew best, 
 Nourish an ethical unrest : 
 Rarely at once will nature give 
 The power to be Flammonde and live. 
 
 We cannot know how much we leam 
 From those who never will return. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 59 
 
 Until a flash of unforeseen 
 Remembrance falls on what has been. 
 We've each a darkening hill to climb ; 
 And this is why, from time to time 
 In Tilbury Town, we look beyond 
 Horizons for the man Flammonde. 
 
 Perhaps no poem which Mr. Robinson has written" 
 serves so well as this to illustrate certain qualities 
 of the poet's style. Here we have one of the s impj e, ■' 
 direct stanza forms in which he delights. There is 
 no very haunting li lt in this rhyth m; there are no 
 tricks, no advis ed and consc ious expertness of rhyme 
 schemes; no pleasu re in new uivet rtions: no uneven 
 lines falling into _an original pattern. It is all 
 straight, sev ere, and qui et. It is also admirable. 
 The poet never compromises with his metre; he 
 allows himself no false accents nor over-long lines. 
 In fact, the charm of the j5rm is just here : in the 
 apparent ease with which this fitting of words and 
 metre is accomplished. T hey-^ee m to be absolutely 
 one and inevitable. His instrument is a three- 
 stringed lute; but with what~precision he plays 
 upon it! There are no f ault o of intonation, al- 
 though the song is limitedjjdthin the compass of 
 a few notes. 
 
 "Flammonde" reveals characteristics of style 
 besides those of rhythm. Nowhere else can we find 
 better illustrated the poet's extraordinary powers 
 of condensation made possible by a rarely imagina- 
 
6o Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 tive use of epithet. For instance, this description 
 of the man : 
 
 He pictured all tradition hears 
 Of what we owe to fifty years. 
 
 and again : 
 
 His courtesy beguiled and foiled 
 Suspicion that his years were soiled. 
 
 The most subtle of all these instances in the poem is 
 contained in the lines : 
 
 There was a woman in our town 
 On whom the fashion was to frown ; 
 But while our talk renewed the tinge 
 Of a long-faded scarlet fringe, 
 The man Flammonde saw none of that. 
 
 "A long-faded scariet fringe" is not only imagina- 
 tive, it has something of Flammonde's own forgiving 
 tenderness. 
 
 Tend eraess is one of the finer qualities of Mr. 
 Robinson's later poetry. The swift, caustic etching 
 of his early poems has mellowed into a gentle, 
 extenuating understanding. Youth condemns ; ma- 
 turity condones. And where maturity has lost 
 nothing of the vitality of youth, the result is great 
 poetry. 
 
 Throughout this chapter, I have spolfen -several 
 times of Mr. Robinson's obscure, sometimes posi- 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 6 1 
 
 tively cryptic, method of expressing an idea. In 
 "Captain Craig, "*~llliT nieLliuii>4eg^nerated into a 
 confusion so intense that the reader wearied in 
 tracking the poet's meaning. In fact, it may very 
 fairly be said to have ruined the poem. 
 
 Mr. Robinson never entirely shakes off this 
 mannerism, but in "Flammonde," it is held in leash, 
 with the result that instead of confusion, we get a 
 sense of haunting mystery : 
 
 What was he, when we came to sift 
 Jlis meaning and to note the drift . 
 
 Of incommunicable ways 
 That makes us ponder while we praise ? 
 
 The whole stanza, of which these lines are a part, is 
 full of this strange, intangible feeling of mystery. 
 
 For a touch of modernity — science colouring 
 the conceptions of the day, yet falling imagi- 
 natively and musically into the poem — take this 
 passage : 
 
 Nor need we now, since he knew best, 
 Nourish an ethical unrest. 
 
 Mr. Robinson is always a poet ; but he is also, and 
 completely, a man o j hia miv:;n tipie. It is because 
 this is so, that he has been able to give a new 
 and different voice to that eternal thing which is 
 poetry. 
 
62 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 There are many poems in this volume which I 
 should like to quote: "The Clinging Vine" for 
 drama; "Stafford's Cabin" for suggestion. But I 
 must content myself with only one. This "Frag- 
 ment," not of a poem, but of a man's life, his whole, 
 shattered, unfinished life, is one of Mr. Robinson's 
 finest poems. Here is much in little, and, among 
 other things, one of the most vivid, the most beauti- 
 ful, descriptions to be found in his work. 
 
 FRAGMENT 
 
 Faint white pillars that seem to fade 
 
 As you look from here are the first one sees 
 
 Of his house where it hides and dies in a shade 
 
 Of beeches and oaks and hickory trees. 
 
 Now many a man, given woods like these, 
 
 And a house Hke that, and the Briony gold. 
 
 Would have said, "There are still some gods to please. 
 
 And houses are built without hands, we're told." 
 
 There are the pillars and all gone gray. 
 Briony's hair went white. You may see 
 Where the garden was if you come this way. 
 That sun-dial scared him, he said to me ; 
 "Sooner or later they strike," said he. 
 And he never got that from the books he read. 
 Others are flourishing, worse than he. 
 But he knew too much for the life he led. 
 
 And who knows all knows ever3rthing 
 That a patient ghost at last retrieves ; 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 63 
 
 There's more to be known of his harvesting 
 
 When Time the thresher unbinds the sheaves ; 
 
 And there's more to be heard than a wind that grieves 
 
 For Briony now in this ageless oak, 
 
 Driving the first of its withered leaves 
 
 Over the stones where the fountain broke. 
 
 . . . / 
 
 Still the volume is sad. /Joy the poet seems to fear, 
 
 distrusting it, again and again portraying it as 
 mere phantasmagoria ; in its place as the consoler 
 of mankind he would put courage/ Courage and 
 resignation, and the saving qualities of both, of 
 what else are built the poems "Flammonde," "The 
 Gift of God," "Old King Cole," "Eros Turannos," 
 and many others. But how insufficient this nourish- 
 ment for life, is evidenced by the profound melan- 
 choly which pervades the whole book. 
 
 The most recent poem which Mr. Robinson has 
 written, "Merlin," was published by The Macmillan 
 Company in March, 1917. This is, as its name 
 implies, a re-telling of the Arthurian legend, and 
 one cannot help a slight feeling of disappointment 
 that this re-telling is neither so new nor so different 
 as one might have expected. For some reason, 
 the author seems here to have abandoned his pe- 
 culiar and personal style. Instead of a vivid, 
 modern reading of an old theme, instead of the 
 br illiant ps y chologica L_ analysts applied t e- hisLor^^ 
 and legend_JKhich__niade "Ben Jonson Entertains 
 a Man from Stratford" so memorable, we find in 
 
64 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 this book only a rather feeble and emasculated pic- 
 ture, tricked out with charming lyrical figures, it is 
 true, but lifeless and unconvincing. Merlin is 
 no great wizard, swept into Vivian's toils by a 
 fascination which no man, not even he, can resist ; 
 he is a vain, weak old man, playing at a pastoral. 
 Even when conflicting emotions are supposed to 
 tear him, they do not tear, in spite of the author's 
 assurances : 
 
 " When we parted, 
 
 I told her I should see the King again, 
 
 And, having seen him, might go back again 
 
 To see her face once more. But I shall see 
 
 No more the lady Vivian. Let her love 
 
 What man she may, no other love than mine 
 
 Shall be an index of her memories. 
 
 I fear no man who may come after me, 
 
 And I see none. I see her, still in green. 
 
 Beside the fountain. I shall not go back. 
 
 We pay for going back ; and all we get 
 
 Is one more needless ounce of weary wisdom 
 
 To bring away with us. If I come not. 
 
 The lady Vivian will remember me. 
 
 And say : 'I knew him when his heart was young, 
 
 Though I have lost him now. Time called him home, 
 
 And that was as it was ; for much is lost 
 
 Between Broceliande and Camelot.' " 
 
 This is the language of weakness, not of resolution. 
 To be sure, Merlin is a broken man ; but nothing in 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 65 
 
 the poem carries a conviction that he was ever very 
 much otherwise. 
 
 It is a long, meandering tale of some thirteen hun- 
 dred blank verse lines. But the fault is not in its 
 length, it is in the manner in which the poet has 
 comp(^sed-his-^ory. Now the poet who would be a 
 story-teller must concern himself with something 
 beside poetry, beside psychology ; he must learn the^ 
 manipulation of plot. It is just in this matter of 
 plot that Mr. Robinson's work reveals its less able 
 side. When a tale is to be told in a single scene, 
 Mr. Robinson is sure, swift, and adequate. String 
 it out to a series of episodes, and it becomes, not 
 only diluted, but involved to the point where it 
 loses that sharp stroke of drama which makes thi 
 glory of his shorter pieces. -J 
 
 "Merlin" is not so long-winded or obscure as 
 "Captain Craig"; but neither is it so brilliant a 
 character study as "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man 
 from Stratford," nor so well-presented a tragedy as 
 "The Clinging Vine." In reading it, we feel that 
 Mr. Robinson was hampered by the weight of tradi- 
 tion hanging about his subject. He could not quite 
 get to its kernel, absorb it as his own, and, forgetting 
 the necessity of doing something remarkable with 
 it, make it remarkable because remoulded in the fires 
 of his own brain, ^It is good work, creditable work, 
 but it is not great work, and the poet's peculiar 
 excellencies are often lacking. There is too much of 
 
66 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 the f usti an of the antiquary ; too little of the creative 
 vision of the poet. This is just the opposite of 
 "Ben Jonson," which, true always to the place cuid 
 the time, is nevertheless instinct with life. In 
 " Ben Jonson," we pass a couple of men in the street, 
 and overhear a little of their conversation ; there is 
 no feeling of anachronism, we might be there, or 
 they here, so little is the age obtruded. What there 
 ^is, is quite natural, and falls into its proper, subordi- 
 nate place. In " Merlin," we turn over the pages of 
 a beautiful picture-book, a portfolio of old, rare 
 prints. They have nothing to do with us, nor we 
 with them. They are charming, but remote, and 
 — they are only pictures. 
 
 Mr. Robinson is constantly desiring a larger canvas 
 than his fugitive poems permit. He has tried plays, 
 now he essays a narrative poem. Yet, for some 
 reason, he seems never to have realized the different 
 technique necessary for these more sustained efforts. 
 He still remains the poet of the fleeting instant. 
 
 "Merlin" teases by a constant change of scene, 
 now forward, now backward ; now action, now 
 reminiscence. Recollection, knitting up the past 
 with the present, is one of the most difficult things to 
 manage in all narrative writing, whether it be poem, 
 novel, or play. "Merlin" opens with the return of 
 the magician to Camelot, sent for by King Arthur, 
 who feels his throne rocking, menaced as it is by the 
 plotting of his natural son on the one hand, and, on 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 67 
 
 the other, by the intrigues of Lancelot and Queen 
 Guinevere. Merlin comes, but his power is gone, 
 he has nothing to suggest, no vigour to impart. He 
 tells the King what the King knows already : 
 
 " Now, Arthur, since you are a child of mine — 
 A foster-child, and that's a kind of child — 
 Be not from hearsay or despair too eager 
 To dash your meat with bitter seasoning. 
 So none that are more famished than yourself 
 Shall have what you refuse. For you are King, 
 And if you starve yourself, you starve the state ; 
 And then by sundry looks and silences 
 Of those you loved, and by the lax regard 
 Of those you knew for fawning enemies. 
 You may learn soon that you are King no more, 
 But a slack, blasted, and sad-fronted man, 
 Made sadder with a crown. No other friend 
 Than I could say this to you, and say more ; 
 And if you bid me say no more, so be it." 
 
 This contains no help for Arthur, and he breaks 
 out: 
 
 " Why tell a king — 
 
 A poor, foiled, flouted, miserable king — 
 That if he lets rats eat his fingers off 
 He'll have no fingers to fight battles with ? 
 I know as much as that, for I am still 
 A king — who thought himself a little less 
 Than God ; a king who built him palaces 
 
68 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 On sand and mud, and hears them crumbling now, 
 And sees them tottering, as he knew they must. 
 You are the man who made me to be King — 
 Therefore, say anything." 
 
 But Merlin has very little to say; of Modred he 
 urges, "Trust him not ;" he tells the King, however, 
 that Lancelot "will have you first;" and ends, "Let 
 that be all, for I can say no more." Cold comfort, 
 indeed ! And the King goes to bed to toss with 
 nightmares through the long night. There is no 
 more beautiful passage in the poem than these lines 
 which end the third section : 
 
 No tide that ever crashed on Lyonnesse 
 Drove echoes inland that were loneUer 
 For widowed ears among the fisher-foUc, 
 Than for the King were memories tonight 
 Of old illusions that were dead forever. 
 
 Merlin returns to Brittany and Vivian, but this is 
 hardly touched upon ; instead, the poem harks 
 back to Merlin's first coming, ten years before, and 
 continues as reminiscence for fifty pages. Then 
 we come back to the present and Merlin's return. 
 
 Some of the best parts of the whole volume lie 
 in these fifty pages. Still, this long mood of recollec- 
 tion delays the action, stays the movement so com- 
 pletely that it is never quite recovered, and the feeling 
 of unreality, of dream, persists to the end. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 69 
 
 Ccin the poem be said really to end? So little 
 rounded is it, that it almost seems as though'it might 
 have stopped before or after the last line without 
 affecting the result. True, Merlin finally parts from 
 Vivian. But it is all misty and unreal — there may 
 be other meetings, other partings, changes so con- 
 stant as to make a never-ending progression. It is 
 possible that the poet may have meant just this, but 
 I doubt it, as there seems no reason for such a 
 meaning. /The poem is a piece snipped off a heavily 
 brocaded tapestry, but the scissors might have cut 
 either to the right or to the left of the line they did 
 take without much injuring the whole./ For the 
 pattern is too large for any such clipping ; wherever 
 it was severed, we should get only an unrelated 
 square. 
 
 A work of art should round its pattern somehow/) 
 "Merlin" fails to satisfy because the ends ravel f 
 away without any such rounding. 
 
 This is not to say that, because the complete con- 
 ception is outlined with insufficient firmness, there 
 are not beautiful parts in this long poem. Some 
 passages are the finest of their kind that Mr. Robin- 
 son has written. For once, he seems to have allowed 1 
 his lyricisffl free play, and the result makes the 
 reader hope that he will never again feel it necessary 
 to curb it. The whole account of Merlin's first" 
 coming to Broceliande is charming. Let us take a 
 few lines here and there : 
 
70 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Over the waves and into Brittany 
 
 Went Merlin, to Broceliande. Gay birds 
 
 Were singing high to greet him all along 
 
 A broad and sanded woodland avenue 
 
 That led him on forever, so he thought, 
 
 Until at last there was an end of it ; 
 
 And at the end there was a gate of iron, 
 
 Wrought heavily and invidiously barred. 
 
 He pulled a cord that rang somewhere a bell 
 
 Of many echoes, and sat down to rest. 
 
 Outside the keeper's house, upon a bench 
 
 Of carven stone that might for centuries 
 
 Have waited there in silence to receive him. 
 
 The birds were singing still ; leaves flashed and swung 
 
 Before him in the sunlight ; a soft breeze 
 
 Made intermittent whisperings around him 
 
 Of love and fate and danger, and faint waves 
 
 Of many sweetly-stinging fragile odors 
 
 Broke lightly as they touched him ; cherry-boughs 
 
 Above him snowed white petals down upon him, 
 
 And under their slow falling Merlin smiled 
 
 Contentedly. 
 
 I can recall few such images as "leaves flashed 
 and swung," or "many sweetly-stinging fragile odors 
 broke lightiy as tiiey touched him," in the earlier 
 books. 
 
 Merlin and his guide proceed 
 
 Down shaded ways, through open ways with hedgerows. 
 And into shade again more deep than ever. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 71 
 
 But edged anon with rays of broken sunshine 
 In which a fountain, raining crystal music, 
 Made faery magic of it through green leafage, 
 Till Merlin's eyes were dim with preparation 
 For sight now of the lady Vivian. 
 
 The description of tiie magician's eyes as "dim 
 with preparation " is one of those sudden stampings 
 of emotion into fact which make Mr. Robinson's 
 work so poetically, so actually, true. We see the 
 same thing when Merlin says : 
 
 " If I were young, God knows if I were safe 
 Ganceming you in green, Uke a shm cedar, 
 As you are now, to say my life was mine : 
 Were you to say to me that I should end it, 
 Longevity for me were jeopardized. 
 Have you your green on always and all over ? " 
 
 There is another beautiful, Ij^ripal touch when 
 Vivian leads Merlin to the house : 
 
 Along a dusky way between tall cones 
 Of tight green cedars. 
 
 But then, the poem is full of them. I shall cite only 
 two others. This : 
 
 The sun went down, and the dark after it 
 Starred Merlin's new abode with many a sconced 
 And many a moving candle. 
 
 and this, when Merlin joins Vivian at supper : 
 
72 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The lady Vivian in a fragile sheath 
 Of crimson, dimmed and veiled ineffably 
 By the flame-shaken gloom wherein she sat, 
 And twinkled if she moved, heard MerUn coming, 
 And smiled as if to make herself believe 
 Her joy was all a triumph ; yet her blood 
 Confessed a tingUng of more wonderment 
 Than all her five and twenty worldly years 
 Of waiting for this triumph could remember ; 
 And when she knew and felt the slower tread 
 Of his unseen advance among the shadows 
 To the small haven of uncertain light 
 That held her in it as a torch-lit shoal 
 Might hold a smooth red fish, her listening skin 
 Responded with a creeping underneath it. 
 And a creeping that was incident alike 
 ' To darkness, love, and mice. 
 
 So they sup, to the music of 
 
 haU-heard, dream-weaving interludes 
 Of distant flutes and viols, made yet more distant 
 By faint nostalgic hautboys blown from nowhere. 
 
 Certainly, a poem which contains such beauties as 
 these must be forgiven whatever lapses of construc- 
 tion it exhibits as a whole. It is just these portions 
 which prove Mr. Robinson to be still advancing. If 
 the book, in its entirety, is not so successful as 
 "The Man Against the Sky," there are directions 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 73 
 
 in which he has distanced the achievement of that 
 volume. 
 
 Probably the key-note of the story is much the 
 same as in the title poem of the earlier book. We 
 seem to have it here, in the words of Dagonet, the 
 fool, commenting upon what Merlin has told him : 
 
 ". . . . You say the torch 
 Of woman and the light that Galahad found 
 Are some day to illuminate the world ? 
 I'll meditate on that.'' 
 
 The same note as in "The Man Against the Sky," 
 but less vaguely conceived, with more of tangibility, 
 and also, sadly enough, more of question. From 
 "The Children of the Night" to these last pages of 
 "Merlin," the preoccupation continues. The pre- 
 occupation of a man flung ruthlessly out of one age 
 into another, and seeking — seeking — for some 
 sure ground on which to stand. The Grail, and 
 Woman ! So he searches, hoping, half -convinced, 
 and suffers ; and the magician who has prophesied 
 can only sigh and add : 
 
 " Not wholly dead, but old. Merlin is old." 
 
 So Merlin and the fool 
 
 arose 
 
 And, saying nothing, found a groping way 
 Down through the gloom together. Fiercer now, 
 
74 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The wind was like a flying animal 
 That beat the two of them incessantly 
 With icy wings, and bit them as they went. 
 The rock above them was an empty place 
 Where neither seer nor fool should view again 
 The stricken city. Colder blew the wind 
 Across the world, and on it heavier lay 
 The shadow and the burden of the night; 
 And there was darkness over Camelot. 
 
 Again the sense of tragedy, of courage, of hope and 
 pain. 
 
 It is idle to ask if the greatest poetry can be built 
 upon such negative lines. Certainly, no one will 
 ever go to Mr. Robinson's books to make a gay 
 mood more gay, to fill himself with the zest and 
 sparkle of life. These things Mr. Robinson has 
 not to give. /His poems do not invigorate ; they 
 mellow and subduey But in our material day, the 
 spirituality of Mr. Robinson's work is tonic and 
 uplifting. 
 
 The cryptic expression of much of his poetry can 
 hardly be considered other than a flaw, as it often 
 is in Browning, and why the failure in atmospheric 
 sense which permits such names as "Flammonde" 
 and "Bokardo " to connote New England types, is a 
 question difficult to answer. Mr. Robinson is a 
 painstaking poet, a poet of many revisions. He 
 prunes every tendency to luxuriance from his style. 
 He aims at the starkness of absolute truth, and 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 75 
 
 granted that what he sees be the truth, he usually 
 attains it. 
 
 This poetry is "cribbed, cabin'd and confined" 
 to a remarkable degree, but it is undeniably, mag- 
 nificently noble. 
 

ROBERT FROST 
 
ROBERT FROST 
 
 It is the fashion to-day to speak as though New 
 England mattered very little in the life and thought 
 of these United States of America. New England 
 is small geographically, but concentrated psychically, 
 and thought is one of the things in which concen- 
 tration counts for more than bulk, /t'oetry is the 
 most concentrated form of literature ; it is the most 
 emotionalized and powerful way in which thought 
 can be presented, and it is an interesting commen- 
 tary on the easy scorn with which many non-New 
 Englanders regard New England, that two of the six 
 poets of whom I have to speak in this book should 
 be of the very bone £md sinew of New England. 
 
 In Mr. Robinson, we saw a highly developed, ^ 
 highly sensitized and intellectual, product of the old 
 plain-living and high-thinking generations, throw- 
 ing off the shackles of a superstition and an environ- 
 ment grown too narrow. We saw the poet realizing 
 his century and its changed point of view ■ through 
 a long process of self-analysis. /We saw" him becoming 
 
 79 
 
8o Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 the first spokesman of the New Order in this country 
 through his following of truth in his observation of 
 
 "the world and of himself. Mr. Robinson repre- 
 sents Npw England, Mr. Robert Frost is New Eng- 
 land. /IVIr. Robinson is one of the most intellectual 
 poets writing in America to-day ; Mr. Frost is one 
 of the most intuitive. / But it must never be forgotten 
 that both these men are poets. So when I say, 
 "intellectual," I would not be construed as mean- 
 ing "devoid of passion," for Mr. Robinson is a 
 passionate poet, even though the passion be care- 
 fully restrained; and i when I say, "intuitive," I do 
 not intend the inference that Mr. Frost is deficient 
 in thought, for every line he writes is most care- 
 fully considered.) I would point out, simply, the 
 different manner in which these two men approach 
 
 ^life and their own work. Mr. Robinson speculates 
 about the world, wonders about it, almost agonizes 
 over some of its phases ; "Mr. Frost, plastic arid 
 passive, permits the world to make upon him what 
 imprint it will. Mr. Robinson is concerned that 
 his work tally with the thing observed ; \ Mr. Frost 
 is anxious to trace accurately the markings burnt 
 into the sensitive plate of his mind. Both poets 
 are conscious of the actual work, as every artist 
 must be, but Mr. Robinson is conscious of the sub- 
 stance out of which the work grows, while, with Mr. 
 Frost, this process goes on in the subconscious 
 stratum of his brain. Again, with Mr. Robinson, 
 
Robert Frost 8i 
 
 New England is a thing remembered, compounded 
 of childhood memories and race atavism ; with Mr. 
 Frost, New England is daily environment. Mr. 
 Robinson's characteristics are a composite of the 
 New England of three centuries; while Mr. Frost' 
 typifies the New England of to-day in its en- 
 tirety — a remark which should perhaps be quali- 
 fied by adding the words, "in the country districts." 
 "Mr. Robinson is more universal ; Mr. Frost is more 
 particular. 
 
 The strand which Mr. Frost exemplifies in the 
 woven cord of modem poetry is — poe±ic_xealism.. 
 I might also add that his is the only true bucolic 
 poetry being written m America to-day, and these 
 are no mock bucolics, they are true pastorals of the 
 hill country in which he sp er^sjii&.life. 
 
 All compounded as he seems to be of the granite 
 and gentians of our Northern mountains, Mr. 
 Frost is only of New England stock on his father's 
 side. His mother was bom in Edinburgh, of lowland 
 Scotch descent. A curious fancy, however, might 
 trace here a kinship shared with his native hills, 
 for geologists tell us that the New Hampshire hills 
 and the Scotch Highlands are cousin-german to each 
 other; I have heard, even, that a species of land- 
 locked trout found in Scotland is caught nowhere 
 else but in New Hampshire ponds. 
 
 The poet's father, William Prescott Frost, was 
 born in Kingston, New Hampshire, the ninth gen- 
 
82 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 eration of his family on New England soil. Be- 
 coming a schoolmaster, this gentleman met his 
 wife, Belle Moody, when both were teaching in a 
 small Pennsylvania town, and there they were 
 married, shortly afterwards emigrating to San 
 Francisco where Mr. William Frost became editor 
 of a local newspaper. Their son, Robert Frost, 
 was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1875. 
 
 For some unexplained reason, considering his 
 descent, Mr. William Frost was an ardent Demo- 
 crat. Throughout the Civil War, he was a copper- 
 head, and so strong were his feelings on the subject 
 that at one time he entertained an idea of running 
 away and joining the Confederate Army. He 
 thought better of it, however, and later salved his 
 sympathies by naming his son "Robert Lee." 
 
 Mr. Frost, senior, found the editorship of a 
 democratic paper in a growing, rather filibustering, 
 community such as was the San Francisco of those 
 days, thoroughly congenial. The city was only 
 just evolving from the '"Frisco" of the gold fever, 
 and life there was picturesque and adventurous. 
 Robert Frost well remembers the first Cleveland 
 election, when his father was manager of the Demo- 
 cratic City Committee. The boy was taken out 
 of school to run errands and make himself generally 
 useful, and he has often told of his father's excite- 
 ment and delight when the Democratic party won 
 — its first victory since the war. 
 
Robert Frost 83 
 
 It is not a little singular that these early years in 
 San Francisco should have made so little impres- 
 sion upon the poet. /He, who has proved himself 
 extraordinarily receptive to environment, seems to 
 possess that receptivity only in regard to one en- 
 vironment. /We shall see the same phenomenon at 
 work during his three years' sojourn in England, at 
 a time when he would appear to have been at the 
 very height of his powers. It is true, however, that, 
 in his published work, there is no poem which has 
 San Francisco as a background, nor which seems to 
 owe its inception to this time of the author's life. 
 
 Robert Frost lived in San Francisco for the first 
 ten years of his life, scampering up and down its 
 hills, running in and out of newspaper offices, 
 jostling against the somewhat rough and very de- 
 termined men of the place and period, going to 
 ^school in a desultory fashion. With most poets, 
 one would add, "storing up impressions," but this 
 seems to have been just what Robert Frost did not 
 do. Remembrances of those days he must have, 
 'but not the vivid ones which lead to expression. 
 This is a strange psychological fact. If one be- 
 lieved in supernatural intervention, one would say 
 that Mr. Frost was dedicated from his cradle to be the 
 poet of latter-day New England, and of that alone. 
 
 Mr. William Frost died when his son was ten years 
 old, and the little boy and his mother found them- 
 selves alone, with no relations nearer than the dis- 
 
84 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 tant East. Mrs. Frost's parents were dead, but her 
 husband's father offered a home to her and her child 
 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he held the 
 position of overseer in one of the mills. 
 
 From this time, begins Robert Frost's real life. 
 From thife time, the impressions grow and multiply. 
 There are few moments in Mr. Frost's life in New 
 England that do not have their bearing on his 
 career as a poet. Yet, again, it is the things native 
 to the soil which count. Living in a mill town in 
 which the inhabitants were becoming extraordinarily 
 -mixed as to race, still it is only the New England 
 types which stamp themselves into his conscious- 
 ness. Lawrence was even then expanding into a 
 fair-sized city, but it was the farmhouses on its out- 
 skirts, the villages strewn along the winding roads, 
 that captivated his imagination. At one time, he 
 worked in a mill, and yet there is not a single mill 
 throughout his poems, while every wild flower 
 picked in his rambles was photographed on his 
 heart with the accuracy born of passion. /In making 
 him keenly alive: to .certain impressions and quite 
 degji...to^others/Nature knew her business superla- 
 tively well ; she was moulding a poet to her purposes, 
 and how excellently she has done it we shall soon see/ 
 Mrs. Frost, the poet's mother, was a great reader, 
 and the boy preferred to have her read aloud to him 
 to reading himself. He says that he never read a 
 book through before he was fourteen. His favorite 
 
Robert Frost 85 
 
 lume was "Tom Brown's School Days, and this 
 never finished because he could not bear to feel 
 it it was ended. ^ 
 
 [t is hard to tell at just what moment the artistic 
 pulse first makes itself felt in a future author. Is 
 vorking when the i^npressions are being gathered ? 
 should say — yes, undoubtedly. But, whatever 
 saw and collated, Robert Frost did not begin to 
 ite poetry until he was fifteen. Then occurred 
 it series of love affairs with the great masters 
 ich every future poet must go through. His 
 5t love was Poe. Then came Shakespeare, Chris- 
 a Rossetti, Edward Rowland Sill, Bryant, and a 
 3t of others. Still, in spite of these coquettings 
 
 the way,/Mr. Frost has never been a literary 
 et. His inspiration does not come from books./ 
 ) imaginative reconstruction of the past has ever 
 rigued him.'f^e derives his inspiration from direct 
 itact with the world — the little world of hill 
 d upland, of farmhouse and country town. 
 The boy was put to school in Lawrence, a proceed- 
 <, which, like most healthy boys, he found not at 
 
 to his taste. He loafed along as best he could, 
 ing as little as possible, but still pushing up from 
 ide to grade perforce, and always attending 
 sses assiduously in the great academy of "Out of 
 )ors." 
 
 The work of most poets contains at least one 
 ect reference to their childhood. But, in Mr. 
 
86 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Frost's case, there appears to be no poem which can 
 be taken as referring certainly to this period of his life. 
 Rather, the whole bulk of his work would seem to be 
 a very part of his growth. Still, in his last volume, 
 "Mountain Interval," is a poem, "Birches," which, 
 besides being one of Mr. Frost's most beautiful 
 things, seems to contain more than a hint of the 
 boy he was. 
 
 BIRCHES 
 
 When I see birches bend to left and right 
 Across the hnes of straighter darker trees, 
 I Hke to think some boy's been swinging thern,^ 
 But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. 
 Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them 
 Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning 
 After a rain. They cUck upon themselves 
 As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored 
 As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. 
 Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 
 Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust — 
 Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away 
 You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. 
 They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, 
 And they seem not to break ; though once they are bowed 
 So low for long, they never right themselves : 
 You may see their trunks arching in the woods 
 Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground 
 --'Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair 
 Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 
 But I was ^oing to say when Truth broke in 
 
Robert Frost 87 
 
 With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm 
 
 (Now am I free to be poetical?) 
 
 I should prefer to have some boy bend them 
 
 As he went out and in to fetch the cows — 
 
 Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 
 
 Whose only play was what he found himself, 
 
 Summer or winter, and could play alone^^^ 
 
 One by one he subdued his father's trees 
 
 By riding them down over and over again 
 
 Until he took the stiffness out of them, 
 
 And not one but hung limp, not one was left 
 
 For him to conquer. He learned all there was 
 
 To learn about not launching out too soon 
 
 And so not carrying the tree away 
 
 Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 
 
 To the top branches, climbing carefully 
 
 With the same pains you use to fill a cup 
 
 Up to the brim, and even above the brim. 
 
 Then he fltmg outward, feet first, with a swish, 
 
 Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 
 
 So was I once myself a swinger of birches. 
 
 And so I dream of going back to be. 
 
 It's when I'm weary of considerations, 
 
 And Ufe is too much Hke a pathless wood 
 
 Where your face bums and tickles with the cobwebs 
 
 Broken across it, and one eye is weeping 
 
 From a twig's having lashed across it open. 
 
 I'd like to get away from earth awhile 
 
 And then come back to it and begin over. 
 
 May no fate wilfully misunderstand me 
 
 And half grant what I wish and snatch me away 
 
88 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Not to return. Earth's the right place for love : 
 I don't know where it's likely to go better. 
 I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, 
 And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 
 Toward heaven, tUl the tree could bear no more, 
 But dipped its top and set me down agaia. 
 That would be good both going and coming back. 
 One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. 
 
 We know at least that he was once himself "a 
 swinger of birches." We know, too, that much of 
 his play 
 
 was what he found himself. 
 Summer or winter, and could play alone. 
 
 And we know, by the description of the ice-covered 
 birch-trees, how eagerly he offered his mind to the 
 impress of such pictures. 
 
 In due time, Robert Frost left the Grammar 
 School and entered the High School, and here for 
 the first time his studies began to appeal to him. 
 Probably his teachers were more intelligent and 
 farther advanced than those in the Grammar School, 
 possibly, also, he began to find out that study is 
 only a means, not an end. Whatever the cause, 
 the four years in the High School were successful 
 and pleasant. One of his fellow pupils at the High 
 School was Miss Eleanor Miriam White, the lady 
 he afterwards married. Miss White was a good 
 scholar and a serious young woman, and Mr. Frost 
 
Robert Frost 89 
 
 owes an immeasurable debt to the steadfast purpose 
 of his wife. 
 
 It was in 1892, while still a pupil at the High 
 School, that Mr. Frost began sending poems to 
 magazines. And his first poem to be accepted was 
 taken by "The Independent" for the very usual 
 sum of fifteen dollars, which, however, seemed a 
 munificent figure to the young man. 
 
 In 1893, Mr. Frost graduated from the High 
 School, and the following Autumn he entered Dart- 
 mouth College. College, however, did not agree with 
 his state of mind, the inertia of the Grammar School 
 overcame him again. He could not learn from his 
 teachers ; he could get no mental pabulum from the 
 prescribed courses. Miss White was no longer at his 
 side to spur him on. She had gone to Saint Lawrence 
 University, where, more resolved than the young 
 poet, she followed the entire course and graduated. 
 
 Far from graduating, Robert, Frost only stayed 
 at Dartmouth a few months, then he left, "ran 
 away" would perhaps state the factmore accurately, 
 and returned to his grandfather's house in Lawrence. 
 
 It needs very little imagination to picture the 
 consternation with which he was received. Indeed, 
 his grandfather's disgust was so great that for a time 
 he left the young man to shift for himself. This he 
 did by becoming, among other things, bobbin boy 
 in a mill. Now, the position of bobbin boy is not 
 an exalted one, indeed it is practically at the bottom 
 
90 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 of the long grade of mill workers. For a young man 
 of eighteen, a High School graduate and an aspirant 
 for a College degree, to take such a position is cer- 
 tainly unusual. But it offered, it meant bread and 
 butter, and he took it. , Mr. Frost often says that 
 he has no pride, A most misleading statement. 
 Rather is it that his pride in the profession to which 
 he has dedicated himself is so great that it dulls all 
 other prides, such as the foolish one of social strata, 
 for instance. /Again and again throughout his career, 
 we shall see Mr. Frost the sport, I had very nearly 
 said, of winds of chance. With his eyes firmly fixed 
 upon his chosen goal of poetry, he moves along un- 
 conscious of the particular ground on which his feet 
 are treading. It almost seems as though he turned 
 to the right or the left as the wind blew, yet whether 
 right or left, the path leads him always forward. 
 
 For four years, the poet pursued various avocations 
 in which his heart was not, and wrote poems in which 
 his heart most emphatically was, sending them out 
 once a year to "The Century," "Scribner's," "The 
 Atlantic," or "Harper's," all four the chief publica- 
 tions for poetry at that time. Gradually, "The 
 Youth's Companion" was added to the list, and 
 these, and "The Independent," were the only papers 
 to which he sought entrance for twenty years. For 
 twenty years this persevering endeavour continued, 
 and for twenty years the poet remained, to all 
 intents and purposes, unknown. 
 
Robert Frost 91 
 
 While Mr. Frost was living this outwardly rather 
 vagrant life, he was persisting in another cause as 
 well as that of poetry. He was trying to persuade 
 Miss Eleanor White to abandon her college course 
 and marry him. But the young lady was firm of 
 purpose, and it was not until after her graduation 
 that the marriage took place, in October, 1895. 
 
 Possibly it was her influence which led him to 
 return again to the idea of an ordered course of 
 study. At any rate, in 1897, he moved his little 
 family to Cambridge and entered Harvard, especially 
 to study Latin. He stayed at Harvard for two years, 
 but it was uphill work. He was too old for college 
 curriculums, for one thing, for another, a married 
 undergraduate is naturally set apart from his fellows 
 and cannot, by the nature of things, get all that a 
 university has to offer. Again he gave way before 
 the blowing wind of distaste, and returned to 
 Lawrence with his wife and child. 
 
 Then followed another period of attempts. He 
 tramped, taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly 
 paper called "The Sentinel," and seemed to his 
 family to be moving toward nothing at all. /For they 
 did not count the spasmodic appearances of his 
 poems as anything, after the usual manner of 
 mothers, and grandfathers, and uncles./ 
 
 Finally his grandfather, almost in despair, took 
 pity on him, as he supposed, and, in 1900, bought 
 him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. 
 
92 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 A great many of the poems in his published books 
 would seem to date from the Derry period, if not in 
 actual writing, certainly in substance. Such poems 
 as "Mowing," "Mending Wall," "After Apple- 
 picking," "Putting in the Seed," and a number of 
 others, are written by one who has been in the places 
 described, and doing the things here done. This is 
 not the work of a mere observer, but of a man who 
 has lived what he writes about : 
 
 MOWING 
 
 There was never a sound beside the wood but one, ' 
 
 And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. 
 
 What was it it whispered ? I knew not well myself ; 
 
 Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun. 
 
 Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound — 
 
 And that was why it whispered and did not speak. 
 
 It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, 
 
 Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf : 
 
 Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak 
 
 To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, 
 
 Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers • 
 
 (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. 
 
 The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. 
 
 My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make. 
 
 Is it likely that anyone who has not followed a 
 scythe would realize that it "whispered," or would 
 so vividly picture the bright green snake darting 
 off through the stubble ? 
 
Robert Frost 93 
 
 Here is another poem which could not have been 
 written without actual experience : 
 
 MENDING WALL 
 
 Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
 That sends the frozen-ground swell under it, 
 And spills the upper boulders in the sun ; 
 And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 
 The work of himters is another thing : 
 I have come after them and made repair 
 Where they have left not one stone on stone. 
 But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, 
 To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, 
 No one has seen them made or heard them made, 
 But at spring mending-time we find them there. 
 I let my neighbour know beyond the hill ; 
 And on a day we meet to walk the line 
 And set the wall between us once again. 
 We keep the wall between us as we go. 
 To each the boulders that have fallen to each. 
 And some are loaves and some so nearly balls 
 We have to use a spell to make them balance : 
 "Stay where you are until our backs are turned ! " 
 We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 
 Oh, just another kind of out-door game. 
 One on a side. It comes to Uttle more : 
 There where it is we do not need the wall : 
 He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
 My apple trees will never get across 
 And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
 
94 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours." 
 Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 
 If I could put a notion in his head : 
 " Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it 
 Where there are cows ? But here there are no cows. 
 Before I buUt a wall I'd ask to know 
 What I was walling in or walling out, 
 And to whom I was like to give offence. 
 Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
 That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him. 
 But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather 
 He said it for himself. I see him there 
 Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top 
 In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 
 He moves in darkness as it seems to me. 
 Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 
 He will not go behind his father's sasdng, -. 
 And he likes having thought of it so well 
 He sa3ra again, "Good fences make good neighbours." 
 
 Do most laymen know that a wall should be built 
 by two men working from either side at the same 
 time ? Could anyone not a farmer say : 
 
 He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
 
 My apple trees will never get across 
 
 And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
 
 It is by such touches as these that/ Mr. Frost's 
 poems are great; real pastorals, not artificial 
 bucolics, racy with current speech, tanged of the 
 
 soil/ 
 
Robert Frost 95 
 
 I shall consider them more at length when we come 
 to the publication of the volumes of which they form 
 a part. For the time itself was brightened by no 
 publications, except those yearly batches of poems 
 sent to the magazines, of which some were accepted 
 and many were not. Mr. Frost was still a sort of 
 ne'er-do-weH in the eyes of the older generation, 
 laboriously starving on one of the stone-infested 
 farms of Southern New Hampshire. 
 
 Derry is in Rockingham County, the South- 
 easternmost extremity of New Hampshire, £md not 
 so very far North of Lawrence. Kingston, his 
 father's birthplace, is also in Rockingham County 
 and not many miles to the North of Derry; in 
 buying his grandson a farm in Derry, therefore, Mr. 
 William Frost was merely in a measure returning 
 upon his own life. But returns are dangerous things. 
 The whole farming industry of New England had 
 been knocked on the head by the opening up of the 
 West. The enterprising youths of these country 
 districts had gone to make their fortunes oa the 
 stretching meadows of Western plains. To start 
 life in San Francisco and work back to a farm in 
 Derry, New Hampshire, would have been retrogres- 
 sion indeed for anyone with a less special- destiny 
 than Mr. Frost. Here was a young man, twenty- 
 five years old, whose horizon since he was ten had 
 been bounded by Hanover on the North and Boston 
 on the South, only a few hundred miles either way. 
 
96 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Here was this same young man working from morn- 
 ing till night to tear a living out of the thin soil. 
 Yet, however despairing the outlook seemed, this 
 was the very^coneertenatiiSir-of circumstance and 
 surrounding that the poet needed. A few hundred 
 miles was to contain all his poetic world, but these 
 / few hundred miles were to be deepened indefinitely 
 V by the delving of his own spade. 
 
 Robert Frost was digging poetry with every shovel- 
 ful, but he was not digging a sustenance for his grow- 
 ing family. Derry boasts that most New England 
 institution, an academy. In this case, the Pinker- 
 ton Academy ; and Mr. Frost was taken into it as a 
 teacher, going on from there to the Normal School 
 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 191 1. 
 
 Plymouth is a small town of some fifteen hundred 
 inhabitants, standing among the swelling foot-hills of 
 the White Mountains. Perhaps his residence there 
 widened the poet's horizon by another twenty or 
 thirty miles, still the few hundred held good, and a 
 great desire to get away, to see somewhere else — 
 England — took possession of him. 
 
 We can very well believe that, all unconscious, 
 Mr. Frost felt the need of rest. Rest from those 
 mental impressions which constantly crowded upon 
 ^ him in his chosen environment. /What he probably 
 said to himself was that he wanted change and a new 
 outlook ; what he really desired was peace, and no 
 outlook at all, or rather only that detached outlook 
 
Robert Frost 97 
 
 we get when we observe something with which we 
 are in no way concerned. /The opportunity came 
 by the sale of his farm in Derry, and in September, 
 1912, Mr. Frost and his family set sail for England. 
 
 England just before the war was an exceedingly 
 stimulating place for poets. The present interest 
 in poetry had not yet started in America, al- 
 though circumstances were moving toward it. It 
 is a significant fact that "Poetry," Miss Monroe's 
 "Magazine of Verse," appeared for the first time in 
 October, 1912, just one month after Mr. Frost went 
 away. He left a country apparently deaf to his 
 work, he came back to find — but I anticipate. 
 
 London was full of poets, and, what is better, the 
 beliefs, and protests, and hates of poets. They made 
 a lively buzzing which meant that the art was in a 
 vigorous condition. There was "The Poetry Re- 
 view," edited by Stephen Phillips, and devoted to the 
 more conservative practitioners of the art ; there was 
 " Poetry and Drama," sprung off from the older peri- 
 odical in revolt, and opening its columns to. a more 
 radical group ; and lastly there was Ezra Pound and 
 a little band of insurgents gathered about him, who 
 denounced both groups with a charming impartiality. 
 
 Mr. Harold Munro had just started his Poetry 
 BxDok Shop, where readings by poets of their own 
 work were held periodically ; and here, there, and 
 everywhere, if you happened to be a poet, was talk 
 of forms and directions, technique and substance, 
 
98 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 the thousand and one things which, if taken in small 
 doses, do so much to keep the poet's craft sound and 
 sane. The wise man does not spend his days in any 
 cenacle, no matter how alluring, he can only spare a 
 few days and nights of his life to talking about his 
 art lest the thing itself should take unto itself wings 
 and fly away from this clogging mist of discussion. 
 
 The better poets knew this, and although there was 
 a constant coming and going, the persons changed 
 but the meetings went on. "By ones, by twos, by 
 threes," to paraphrase "The Ingoldsby Legends," 
 poets met, and talked, and parted, and met again. 
 To anyone less firmly set on his own artistic feet 
 than Mr. Frost, the situation was intoxicating, but 
 it is characteristic of the man that he lost neither 
 his head nor his originality. He changed no whit in 
 poetry, speech, or appearance. He talked and 
 listened, and went home and did the same thing 
 right over again only better, I am forced to believe, 
 since his second book is much finer than his first. 
 This first, "A Boy's Will," was published by David 
 Nutt, London, in 1913. 
 
 "A Boy's Will" is a slender little volume of sixty- 
 three pages. ~ In the Table of Contents, each poem 
 has a sort of explanation under it. For instance: 
 
 Into My Own 
 
 The youth is persuaded that he will be 
 rather more than less himself for having 
 forsworn the world. 
 
Robert Frost 99 
 
 Ghost House 
 
 He is happy in society of his own choosing. 
 
 Wind and Window Flower 
 
 Out of the winter things he fashions a 
 story of modem love. 
 
 A Dream Pang 
 
 He is shown by a dream how really well 
 it is with him. 
 
 Mowing 
 
 He takes up life simply with the small 
 tasks. 
 
 'hese are only a few of the titles, but they will 
 irve to show how much more subjectiyie the book 
 I than Mr. Frost's other volumes. 
 The poet has not quite attained his own particular 
 peech in most of these poems, the ability to bring 
 p a whole picture or emotion in a simple word 
 1 not yet fully his. This poem is most charming, 
 articularly the last line, but it might have been 
 Titten by some other poet than Robert Frost : 
 
 ROSE POGONIAS 
 
 A saturated meadow, 
 
 Sun-shaped and jewel-small, 
 A circle scarcely wider 
 
100 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Than the trees around were tall ; 
 Where winds were quite excluded, 
 
 And the air was stifling sweet 
 With the breath of many flowers, — 
 
 A temple of the heat. 
 
 There we bowed us in the burning, 
 
 As the sun's right worship is, 
 To pick where none could miss them 
 
 A thousand orchises ; 
 For though the grass was scattered. 
 
 Yet every second spear 
 Seemed tipped with wings of color, 
 
 That tinged the atmosphere. 
 
 We raised a simple prayer 
 
 Before we left the spot. 
 That in the general mowing 
 
 That place might be forgot ; 
 Or if not aU so favoured, 
 
 Obtain such grace of hours, 
 That none should mow the grass there 
 
 While so confused with flowers. 
 
 This next one, however, has some of his later 
 flavour, and with it a delightful lyric quality : 
 
 TO THE THAWING WIND 
 
 Come with rain, loud Southwester ! 
 Bring the singer, bring the nester ; 
 Give the buried flower a dream ; 
 
Robert Frost loi 
 
 Make the settled snow-bank steam ; 
 Find the brown beneath the white ; 
 But what'er you do to-night, 
 Bathe my window, make it flow. 
 Melt it as the ices go ; 
 Melt the glass and leave the sticks 
 Like a hermit's crucifix ; 
 Burst into my narrow stall ; 
 Swing the picture on the wall ; 
 Run the rattling pages o'er ; 
 Scatter poems on the floor ; 
 Turn the poet out of door. 
 
 The book has lovely things in it, characteristic 
 things. For instance, of a mower : 
 
 I looked for him behind an isle of trees ; 
 I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. 
 
 And, of an October morning : 
 
 Retard the sun with gentle mist ; 
 Enchant the land with amethyst. 
 Slow, slow ! 
 
 For the grapes' sake, if they were all. 
 Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, 
 Whose clustered fruit must else be lost — 
 For the grapes' sake along the wall. 
 
 Yet the clean-cut vigour of his later work is absent/' 
 
 '.'A Boy's Will" was pleasantly received by the 
 London papers. " The Academy " said of it : "We 
 
102 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 have read every line with that amazement and de- 
 light which are too seldom evoked by books of modern 
 verse." What was more remarkable was that the 
 various warring groups of young poets were for once 
 agreed. They all recognized the beauty of this 
 poetry, in one way or another. The book was, in 
 fact, without being in any sense great, an excellent 
 start. 
 
 Meanwhile, the poet and his family were living 
 in the little suburban town of Beaconsfield in Buck- 
 inghamshire. Hitherto, the money for the farm had 
 been the active support of the family, now, unfor- 
 tunately, this fund was becoming exhausted. Some- 
 thing had to be done. Mr. Frost had been a farmer, 
 he understood the business and it offered the only 
 practical means of subsisting while he continued to 
 write poetry. He took the lease of a small farm on 
 the outskirts of the village of Little Iddens, near 
 Leadbury, in Gloucestershire, and went there to 
 live in the early Winter of 1914. 
 
 This farming venture was not a professional one. 
 Mr. Frost did not concern himself with raising prod- 
 uce for the market, he was content to raise enough 
 to feed his family, and so reduce the household ex- 
 penses and put off the final disappearance of his 
 small capital. 
 
 Country life in England is not the isolated and 
 lonely thing it is in America. For one reason, no- 
 where is very far from London, and the poet could 
 
Robert Frost 103 
 
 run up to town from time to time and enjoy his poeti- 
 cal talks without putting too great a strain upon 
 either his time or his finances. Even at home he had 
 his discussions, for two of the younger poets were 
 his neighbours : Lascelles Abercrombie, the writer of 
 sonorous blank verse, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, 
 poet of harsh drama and rough tragedy, whose work 
 is so well known to Americans. But if Ezra Pound's 
 preciosity had no effect upon Mr. Frost, neither did 
 Mr. Abercrombie's classicism, nor Mr. Gibson's 
 stem brutality. He went his own way, grew his 
 vegetables, and wrote "North of Boston.'/^ 
 
 "North of Boston" appeared, again from the 
 press of David Nutt, in the Spring of 1914. 
 ~^ It speaks volumes for the still somnolent state of 
 American publishers, that such an intensely Ameri- 
 ^.can volume should have been issued first in England. 
 Things had begun to change here as far as the maga- 
 zines were concerned, but the publishers remained 
 skeptical. I am happy to say that all that is differ- 
 ent now. 
 
 I had passed the Summer of 1914 in England, and 
 there I had heard much talk of "North of Boston." 
 I well remember purchasing the little green volume 
 at The Poetry Book Shop, and spending an evening 
 reading it with ever increasing delight. On my 
 return home, I suggested its publication to no less 
 than two publishing houses, but the suggestion met 
 with no response, and with its subsequent issue by 
 
104 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Messrs. Henry Holt and Company I regret to say 
 that I had nothing to do. 
 
 ' With the publication of "North of Boston," Mr. 
 Frost's reputation was suddenly made. There was 
 hardly a dissenting voice as to its merits. A paper 
 usually so hostile to American verse as "The Times" 
 wrote : " Poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint 
 wind breathes upon smouldering embers." A beau- 
 tiful and accurate characterization, for, through 
 the homely, quiet words rises a faint pungency, 
 the very aroma of poesy floating thinly up into 
 the air. 
 
 "North of Boston" is a "book of people," as Mr. 
 Frost has said in his dedication. It is a volume of 
 stories ; long, interesting stories of those New 
 Hampshire folk dwelling between the two poles of 
 Mr. Frost's "few hundred__miles.'' There is no 
 whisper of English influence in this poetry, it is the 
 very nostalgia of his New England hills. The 
 speech is New England, except in one particular 
 which I shall mention later, although the poet 
 eschews dialect. His eyes may see the soft rounded 
 English country, with its stiles and tufted trees, 
 but the lines etched upon his heart are the articulate 
 outlines of rock and hemlock, the angular sharpness 
 of stone walls and white clapboarded houses against 
 a hard blue sky. 
 
 A little poem in italics serves as motto to the 
 volume, and may very well serve as motto to all 
 
Robert Frost 105 
 
 Mr. Frost's work. For here in a few words is an 
 upland pasture with the farmer at work in it, and 
 -here is that tenderness, that love of place and people 
 which marks all that this poet does :/ 
 
 THE PASTURE 
 
 I'm going out to clean the pasture spring ; 
 I'll only stop to rake the leaves away 
 (And wait to watch the water clear, I may) : 
 I sha'n't be gone long. — You come too. 
 
 I'm going out to fetch the little calf 
 That's standing by the mother. It's so young 
 It totters when she Ucks it with her tongue. 
 I sha'n't be gone long. — You come too. / 
 
 "North of Boston" is a very sad book. All the 
 sadder, perhaps, because the poet is at no pains to 
 make it so. He is holding no brief for or against the 
 state of things he portrays, he is too much a part of 
 it himself to exhibit it as an illustration of anything. 
 He writes of it because it is his, his to love and 
 present. Yet, in spite of its author's sympathetic 
 touch, the book reveals a disease which is eating 
 into the vitals of our New England life, at least in its 
 ruml communities. 
 
 ~ /What is there in the hard, vigorous climate of 
 these states which plants the seeds of degeneration ? 
 Is the violence and ugliness of their religious belief 
 
I06 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 the cause of these twisted and tortured lives ? yHave 
 the sane, full-blooded men all been drafted away to 
 the cities, or the West, leaving behind only feeble 
 remainders of a once fine stock ? The question again 
 demands an answer after the reading of Mr. Frost's 
 book. 
 
 Other countries can rear a sturdy peasantry which 
 maintains itself for generations, heavy and slow, 
 perhaps, but strong and self-replenishing ; and this 
 for a length of time beside which our New England 
 civilization is as nothing. We are often told that 
 the telephone has done much to decrease insanity 
 in the farming districts, and doubtless it is true. 
 New England Winters are long and isolating. But 
 what about Russian Winters, Polish, Swedish, Nor- 
 wegian ? After all, the telephon'e is a very modem 
 invention, and these countries have been producing 
 a hardy peasantry for hundreds of years. It is said 
 that the country people • of these nations are 
 less highly organized," less well educated, than are 
 New Englanders, and so better able to stand the 
 loneliness of long Winters. But this does not ex- 
 plain the great numbers of people, sprung from old 
 New England stock, but not themselves living in 
 rernote country places, who go insane. 
 
 It is a question for the psychiatrist to answer, and 
 it would be interesting to ask it with "North of 
 Boston" as a text-book to go by. Mr. Frost has 
 reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness 
 
I Robert Frost 107 
 
 which is extraordinary. Here are the huge hills, 
 ilndraped by any sympathetic legend, felt as things 
 hard and unyielding, almost sinister, not exactly 
 feared, but regarded as in some sort influences 
 nevertheless. Here are great stretches of blue- 
 berry pasture lying in the sun ; and again, Autumn 
 orchards cracking with fruit which it is almost too 
 much trouble to gather. Heavy thunder-storms 
 drench the lonely roads and spatter on the walls of 
 farmhouses rotting in abandonment ; and the mod- 
 ern New England town, with narrow frame houses, 
 visited by drummers alone, is painted in all its 
 ~4igliness. For Mr. Frost's is not the kindly New 
 England of Whittier, nor the humorous and sensi- 
 ble one of Lowell ; it is a latter-day New England, 
 where a civilization is decaying ., to, give place to 
 another and very different one. 
 
 Mr. Frost does not deal with the changed popu- 
 , lation, with the Canadians and Finns who are 
 -taking up the deserted farms. His people are left- 
 overs of the old stock, morbid, pursued by phantoms, 
 slowly sinking to insanity. In " The Black Cottage, ' ' 
 we have the pathos of the abandoned house, after the 
 death of the stern, narrow-minded woman who had 
 lived in it. In "A Servant to Servants," we have a' 
 woman already insane once and drifting there again, 
 with the consciousness that her drab, monotonous 
 life is bringing it upon her. "Home Burial" gives 
 the morbidness of death in these remote places — a 
 
io8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 woman unable to take up her life again after her 
 only child has died. The charming idyll, "After 
 Apple-picking," is dusted over with something 
 uncanny, and "The Fear" is a horrible revelation 
 of those undercurrents which go on as much in the 
 country as in the city, and with anxiety eating away 
 whatever satisfaction the following of desire might 
 have brought. There is very much the same theme 
 in "The Housekeeper," while "The Generations of 
 Men" shows that foolish pride in a useless race 
 which is so strange a characteristic of these people. 
 /It is all here — die book is an epitome of a decaying 
 New England. / 
 
 Mr. Frost writes almost as a man under a spell. 
 As though he were the mouthpiece of something 
 beyond himself, only conscious of the necessity of 
 stating what is in him. There is throughout the 
 entire book an undercurrent of his own lines : 
 
 I am overtired 
 
 Of the great harvest I myself desired. 
 
 Still he must gather it ; it is what he is here to do. 
 The whole of the poem from which that quotation 
 is taken, "After Apple-picking," is mystical with 
 this sense of an unsought burden imposed. 
 
 AFTER APPLE-PICKING 
 
 My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree 
 Toward heaven still, 
 
Robert Frost 109 
 
 And there's a barrel that I didn't fill 
 
 Beside it, and there may be two or three 
 
 Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. 
 
 But I am done with apple-picking now. 
 
 Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 
 
 The scent of apples : I am drowsing off. 
 
 I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight 
 
 I got from looking through a pane of glass 
 
 I skinmied this morning from the drinking trough 
 
 And held against the world of hoary grass. 
 
 It melted, and I let it fall and break. 
 
 But I was well 
 
 Upon my way to sleep before it fell. 
 
 And I could tell 
 
 What form my dreaming was about to take. 
 
 Magnified apples appear and disappear. 
 
 Stem end and blossom end, 
 
 And every fleck of russet showing clear. 
 
 My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 
 
 It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 
 
 I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 
 
 And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 
 
 The rumbHng sound 
 
 Of load on load of apples coming in. 
 
 For I have had too much 
 
 Of apple-picking : I am overtired 
 
 Of the great harvest I myself desired. 
 
 There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 
 
 Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 
 
 For all 
 
 That struck the earth, 
 
no Tendencies in Modern American Poetry _ 
 
 No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble. 
 
 Went surely to the cider-apple heap 
 
 As of no worth. 
 
 One can see what will trouble 
 
 This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 
 
 Were he not gone, 
 
 The woodchuck could say whether it's like his 
 
 Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 
 
 Or just some human sleep. 
 
 Is it not true that he cannot tell "what form his 
 dreaming is about to take" ? I have said that Mr. 
 Frost is an intuitive poet. This poem shows his 
 sense of intuition becoming almost conscious. 
 
 Truly the mysticism in "After Apple-picking" 
 "burns up out of the poem," for, on the surface, 
 it is one of the most beautifully clear that Mr. 
 Frost has done. The two-pointed ladder sticking 
 through the trees is exceedingly clean and bright as 
 a picture, indeed the whole of the description is 
 excellent. Here, too, we have those touches so 
 siinple^jo-tru£„^o_original, which give Mr. Frost's 
 work such a rare distinction. For instance: 
 
 My instep arch not only keeps the aftie. 
 It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 
 
 Such passages are scattered through all the poems 
 in "North of Boston." Sometimes they are purely 
 beautiful, as in this, from "The Death of the 
 Hired Man": 
 
Robert Frost ill 
 
 "I'll sit and see if that small sailing cloud , 
 
 Will hit or miss the moon." 
 
 It hit the mo6n. 
 Then there were three there, making a dim row, 
 The moon, the little silver cloud, and she. 
 
 Sometimes they are beautiful because of thei r abso - 
 
 -lute-fidelit5[_tofact, as in the lines about the ladder 
 
 I have just quoted; or these from "The Woodpile": 
 
 It was a cord of maple, cut and split 
 
 And piled — and measured, four by four by eight. 
 
 And not another like it could I see. 
 
 No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. 
 
 And it was older sure than this year's cutting. 
 
 Or even last year's or the year's before. 
 
 The wood was grey and the bark warping off it 
 
 And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis 
 
 Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. 
 
 "North of Boston" is a book of stories in verse. 
 And Mr. Frost's genius shows itself not only in the 
 verse, but in the stories as such. In verse or in 
 prose, they would be unusual. They are so natural, 
 so obvious, that, in reading them, one says, " I won- 
 der why I never thought of making a story like that ? ' ' 
 But, in spite of the numbers of stories on New Eng- 
 land life, nobody has thought of making such stories 
 before. In some cases, the theme is exceedingly 
 ^ slight, yet the characters are so sharply drawn that 
 they hold the reader's interest in spite of the extreme 
 
112 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 vagueneSp of the plot. Is it that, or is it that Mr. 
 Frost possesses the gift of style, as the English critic, 
 Mr. Edward Garnett, has pointed out ? For, in the 
 final count, it is always this fact of style which makes 
 the glory of a work of art and keeps it alive. Works 
 of art live or die by the manner of their telling 
 rather than by their content, however strange such 
 an idea may be to the contemporary reader. Times 
 change, and what appears significant to one genera- 
 tion is insignificant to another, but beauty of expres- 
 sion remains and is immortal. 
 
 The story of "The Death of the Hired Man" is 
 very simple and very slight. A poor, half-crazed 
 old labourer comes back to the farm where he has 
 occasionally worked. The farmer's wife is in the 
 house, she permits the man to come into the kitchen 
 and rest. Then she goes out to meet her returning 
 husband and beg him to be kind to the old man, and 
 give him something to do, and while her husband 
 goes in to speak to him, she sits on the doorstep and 
 watches the little cloud sailing toward the moon. 
 But, as written by Mr. Frost, this story is full 
 of tenderness, and the foreboding of a silent close. 
 It begins : 
 
 Maxy sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table 
 Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step, 
 She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage 
 To meet him in the doorway with the news 
 And put him on his guard. "Silas is back." 
 
Robert Frost 113 
 
 She pushed him outward with her through the door 
 And shut it after her. "Be kind," she said. 
 She took the market things from Warren's arms 
 And set them on the porch, then drew him down 
 To sit beside her on the wooden steps. 
 
 They talk, the wife persuading, the husband a 
 trifle unwilling. At length, 
 
 Part of a moon was faUing down the west, 
 Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills. 
 Its light poured softly m. her lap. She saw 
 And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand 
 Among the harp-like morning-glory strings. 
 Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves, 
 As if she played unheard the tenderness 
 That wrought on him beside her in the night. 
 "Warren," she said, "he has come home to die : 
 You needn't be afrsiid he'll leave you this time." 
 
 "Home," he mocked gently. 
 
 "Yes, what else but home? 
 It all depends on what you mean by home. 
 Of course he's nothing to us, any more 
 Than was the hound that came a stranger to us 
 Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail. 
 Home is the place where, when you have to go there, 
 They have to take you in." 
 
 " I should have called it 
 Something you somehow haven't to deserve." 
 
114 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Warren leaned out and took a step or two, 
 Picked up a little stick, and brought it back 
 And broke it in his hand and tossed it by. 
 "Silas has better claim on us you think 
 Than on his brother ? Thirteen little miles 
 As the road winds would bring htm to his door. 
 Silas has walked that far no doubt to-day. 
 Why didn't he go there ? His brother's rich, 
 A somebody — director in the bank." 
 
 Finally, her husband (Warren) goes into the house, 
 and she is left musing on the moon and the cloud until 
 
 Warren returned — too soon, it seemed to her, 
 Slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited. 
 
 "Warren," she questioned. 
 
 "Dead," was all he answered. 
 
 That is all, and yet, somehow, it is an adequate 
 and profoundly moving story. 
 
 "The Mountain" is an eery bit of genre painting. 
 The mountain, huge, dominating, remote in its 
 austerity, is the poem : 
 
 The mountain held the town as in a shadow 
 I saw so much before I slept there once ; 
 I noticed that I missed stars in the west, 
 Where its black body cut into the sky. 
 Near me it seemed : I felt it like a wall 
 Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. 
 
Robert Frost 1 15 
 
 And yet between the town and it I found, 
 When I walked forth at dawn to see new things, 
 Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields. 
 The river at the time was fallen away. 
 And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones ; 
 But the signs showed what it had done in spring ; 
 Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass 
 Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark. 
 I crossed the river and swung round the mountain. 
 
 Then comes the countryman, driving an ox-team, 
 who has "heard tell" of a brook "on the top, tip- 
 top" which is 
 
 " . . . . always cold in summer, warm in winter. 
 One of the great sights going is to see 
 It steam ih winter Hke an ox's breath. 
 Until the bushes all along its banks 
 Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles — 
 You know the kind." 
 
 But "I never saw it." All his life he has lived at its 
 base, but never cared to see what was above : 
 
 " . . . .I've always meant to go 
 And look myself, but you know how it is : 
 It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountain 
 You've worked around the foot of all your life. 
 What would I do ? Go in my overalls. 
 With a big stick, the same as when the cows 
 Haven't come down to the bars at milking time ? 
 Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear ? 
 'Twouldn't seem real to climb for climbing it." 
 
Ii6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 Then : 
 
 He drew the oxen toward him with light touches 
 
 Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank, 
 
 Gave them their marching orders and was moving. 
 
 It is an amazing thing, because it is nothing and 
 yet everything — the whole terrible inertia which 
 has settled upon these people dwelling among the 
 unyielding hills. 
 
 The most remarkable stories in the book are 
 '"Home Burial," "A Servant to Servants," and 
 ^'The Fear," and they are also the most terrible. 
 They are the ones which most reveal disease, the 
 disease which starts with a sort of coma of the brain, 
 \as in the countryman of "The Mountain," and ends 
 with complete insanity. 
 
 "Home Burial" is a ghastly indictment of the 
 small family, only too common, alas ! throughout 
 New England. The child dies, and the loneliness, 
 the emptiness, the horror, unsettle the mother's 
 mind. The father has at least the healthiness of 
 work amid the constantly changing seasons to sus- 
 tain him, but the mother has only her dull round 
 of household tasks. 
 
 HOME BURIAL 
 
 He saw her from the bottom of the stairs 
 Before she saw him. She was starting down, 
 Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. 
 
Robert Frost " 117 
 
 She took a doubtful step and then undid it 
 To raise herself and look again. He spoke 
 Advancing toward her : "What is it you see 
 From up there always — for I want to know." 
 She turned and sank upon her skirts at that, 
 And her face changed from terrified to dull. 
 He said to gain time : "What is it you see," 
 Mounting until she cowered imder him. 
 "I wUl find out now — you must tell me, dear." 
 
 But the wife will not tell him : 
 
 She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see, 
 Blind creature ; and a while he didn't see. 
 
 But at last he murmured, "Oh," and again, "Oh." 
 
 What he saw was his child's grave. He goes on : 
 
 "The wonder is I didn't see it at once. 
 I never noticed it from here before. 
 I must be wonted to it — that's the reason. 
 
 There are three stones of slate and one of marble, 
 Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight 
 On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those. 
 But I understand ; it is not the stones. 
 But the child's mound — " 
 
 "Don't, don't, don't, don't," she cried. 
 
 That cry of the woman is terrible in its stark truth. 
 It hurts the reader, it is as unbearable as the real 
 
ii8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 cry would have been, one wants to stop one's ears 
 and shut it out. Printed words can go no farther 
 than this. She says only one word, and it is not the 
 mere repetition which gives it its tragic force, it is 
 the context, the way in which the passage is worked 
 up to this devastating cry. Afterwards : 
 
 She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm 
 That rested on the banister, and shd downstairs ; 
 And turned on him with such a daunting look, 
 He said twice over before he knew himself : 
 "Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?" 
 
 Then she bursts out : 
 
 "Not you ! Oh, where's my hat ? Oh, I don't need it ! 
 I must get out of here. I must get air. 
 I don't know rightly whether any man can." 
 
 He talks to her, tries to soothe her, but everything 
 he says chafes the rawness of her grief : 
 
 "Don't — don't go. 
 Don't carry it to someone else this time. 
 TeU me about it if it's something human. 
 Let me into your grief. I'm not so much 
 Unlike other folks as your standing there 
 Apart would make me out. Give me my chance. 
 I do think, though, you overdo it a little. 
 What was it brought you up to think it the thing 
 To take your mother-loss of a first child 
 So inconsolably — in the face of love. 
 You'd think his memory might be satisfied — " 
 
Robert Frost 119 
 
 "There you go sneering now ! " 
 
 "I'm not, I'm not! 
 You make me angry. I'll come down to you. 
 God, what a woman ! And it's come to this, 
 A man can't speak of his own child that's dead." 
 
 But she has lost all sense of values ; she sees only 
 with the blurred vision of the partially unbal- 
 anced : 
 
 "You can't because you don't know how. 
 If you had any feeUngs, you that dug 
 With your own hand — how could you ? — his little grave ; 
 I saw you from that very window there. 
 Making the gravel leap and leap in air. 
 Leap up, Hke that, like that, and l9,nd so lightly 
 And roll back down the mound beside the hole. 
 I thought. Who is that man ? I didn't know you. 
 And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs 
 To look again, and stUl your spade kept lifting. 
 Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice 
 Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why. 
 But I went near to see with my own eyes. 
 You could sit there with the stains on your shoes 
 Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave 
 And talk about your everyday concerns. 
 You had stood the spade up against the wall 
 Outside there in the entry, for I saw it." 
 
 He has no idea how to cope with her unreason : 
 
I20 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 "I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed. 
 I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed." 
 
 The woman does not spare him. She talks on and 
 on in a torrent of words : 
 
 " I can repeat the very words you were saying. 
 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day 
 
 Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.' 
 
 Think of it, talk like that at such a time ! 
 
 What had how long it takes a birch to rot 
 
 To do with what was in the darkened parlour." 
 
 He holds himself in. Gently he urges her : 
 
 "There, you have said it all and you feel better. 
 You won't go now. You're crying. Close the door. 
 The heart's gone out of it : why keep it up. 
 Amy ! There's someone coming down the road !" 
 
 But he is dealing with a force he does not under- 
 stand — the insidious, creeping force of mental 
 disease. He cannot stop her, reason is powerless : 
 
 She was opening the door wider. 
 "Where do you mean to go ? First tell me that. 
 I'll foUow and bring you back by force. I will ! — " 
 
 Catholic countries, with their insistence upon 
 consecrated ground in which to lay the dead, give 
 no chjmce for horror like this. In England, a 
 state church makes such a situation practically 
 
Robert Frost 121 
 
 impossible. Happily it is unusual, even in New 
 England, but what a travesty of happiness our 
 vaunted freedom has led us into ! The old pioneers- 
 came here to be free, strong. God-fearing, and up- 
 right ; and, behold, they are decayed and demoralized. 
 They flaunted Nature, and she has had her revenge. 
 "Home Burial" shows monotony and a mistaken 
 attitude toward life bringing on insanity. In "The 
 Fear," moral degeneration is leading to the same end. 
 A woman, who has left her husband to live with 
 another man, thinks she sees something in the bushes 
 as she and he are driving home one night : 
 
 "I saw it just as plain as a white plate," 
 She said, "as the light on the dashboard ran 
 Along the bushes at the roadside — a man's face. 
 You must have seen it too." 
 
 "I didn't see it. 
 Are you sure — " 
 
 "Yes, I'm sure!" 
 
 " — it was a face?" 
 
 "Joel, I'll have to look. I can't go in, 
 I can't, and leave a thing like that unsettled." 
 
 She takes the lantern and goes down the road, 
 refusing to let Joel go with her. There she comes 
 face to face with her first husband : 
 
122 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 She stood her ground against the noisy steps 
 That came on, but her body rocked a little. 
 
 "You see," the voice said. 
 
 "Oh." She looked and looked. 
 
 "You don't see — I've a child here by the hand." 
 
 "What's a child doing at this time of night — ?" 
 
 "Out walking. Every child should have the memory 
 Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk. 
 What, son?" 
 
 "Then I should think you'd try to find 
 Somewhere to walk — " 
 
 "The highway as it happens — 
 We're stopping for the fortnight down at Dean's." 
 
 "But if that's all — ■ Joel — you realize — 
 You won't think anjrthing. You understand ? 
 You understand that we have to be careful. 
 This is a very, very lonely place. 
 Joel ! " She spoke as if she couldn't turn. 
 The swinging lantern lengthened to the groimd. 
 It touched, it struck it, clattered and went out. 
 
 Does he kill her, or does she merely think that he 
 is going to do so ? Which one is crazed, he or she? 
 Either way, Nature has taken her toll. 
 
Robert Frost 123 
 
 The most powerful of all these stories, and one of 
 the truest, is "A Servant to Servants." A farmer's 
 wife is talking to a camper : 
 
 " I didn't make you know hovsj glad I was 
 To have you come and camp here on our land. 
 I promised myself to get down some day 
 And see the way you hved, but I don't know ! 
 With a houseful of hungry men to feed 
 I guess you'd find. . . It seems to me 
 I can't express my feelings any more 
 Than I can raise my voice or want to lift 
 My hand (oh, I can lift it when I have to) , 
 Did ever you feel so ? I hope you never. 
 It's got so I don't even know for sure 
 Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything. 
 There's nothing but a voice-like left inside 
 That seems to tell me how I ought to feel, 
 And would feel if I wasn't all gone wrong. 
 You take the lake. I look and look at it. 
 I see it's a fair, pretty sheet of water. 
 I stand and make myself repeat out loud 
 The advantages it has, so long and narrow. 
 Like a deep piece of some old rutming river 
 Cut short off at both ends. It Ues five miles 
 Straight away through the mountain notch 
 From the sink window where I wash the plates, 
 And all our storms come up toward the house, 
 Drawing the slow waves whiter and whiter and whiter. 
 It took my mind off doughnuts and soda biscuit 
 To step outdoors and take the water dazzle 
 A sunny morning." 
 
124 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 She has been insane once, and feels it coming on her 
 again : 
 
 "It's rest I want — there, I have said it out — 
 From cooking meals for hungry hired men 
 And washing dishes after them — from doing 
 Things over and over that just won't stay done.'' 
 
 She tells a dreadful story of her father's mad 
 brother kept in a cage in the barn-loft, shouting 
 obscene words all night long : 
 
 "He'd pull his bars apart like bow and bow-string, 
 And let them go and make them twang until 
 His hands had worn them smooth as any ox-bow." 
 
 Then, wearily, after the story is told, with all its 
 undercurrent of bearing on herself : 
 
 "Bless you, of course you're keeping me from work, 
 But the thing of it is, I need to he kept. 
 There's work enough to do — there's alwajrs that ; 
 But behind's behind. The worst that you can do 
 Is set me back a little more behind. 
 I shan't catch up in this world, anjrway. 
 I'd rather you'd not go unless you must." 
 
 Alas, if "Home Burial" is unusual, even in New 
 England, overworked women are not. And the 
 madman kept in the barn was a miserably common 
 fact a generation ago. 
 
 These are stark stories, but they are not all so 
 terrible as the three we have been considering. 
 
Robert Frost 125 
 
 /I believe Mr. Frost intends "A Hundred Collars" 
 to be humorous ; I find it nothing except a little 
 dull. /Doubtless the timid doctor, the hotel clerk, 
 and the tipsy, provincial reporter, with collars, size 
 eighteen, are well drawn. So is the ugly town 
 
 a place of shrieks and wandering lamps 
 And cars that shook and rattle — and one hotel. 
 
 The poem is a laborious attempt at humour. 
 Mr. Frost is a kindly and genial poet, but he is 
 
 jiever either whimsical or quaint. For this reason, 
 I find his people untrue to type in one important 
 
 particular. /In none of them do we find that pun- 
 gency of thought or expression which is so ingrained 
 in the New England temper. Characters and situa- 
 tions impress him, speech does not./ It is probably 
 for this reason that he uses no dialect in these poems. 
 New England turns of speech would lose much of 
 their raciness without the peculiar pronunciation 
 which accompanies them. 
 
 Mr. Frost gives us no such delicious bits of humour 
 as James Russell Lowell's : 
 
 We're curus critters : Now ain't jes' the minute 
 That ever fits us easy while we're in it. 
 
 or Alice Brown's: "I tried to do all I could foF^em 
 that was in need. But I never lived my life with 
 'em, even when I was tendin' upon 'em and gettin' 
 kind of achey trottin' up an' down stairs." 
 
126 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Speech like that is of the essence of New England. 
 Picturesque words, quaintly turned to half conceal, 
 half reveal, a solemn truth. For the New Eng- 
 lander's comedy borders upon tragedy ; and his 
 tragedy is expressed with a whimsicality from 
 which the tears are never far away. Vivid, para- 
 doxical, constantly interesting, such is New England 
 talk, and yet Mr. Frost has ignored it absolutely. 
 ~He feels the people, but he has no ear for their 
 peculiar tongue. 
 
 It speaks marvellously for the vividness of the 
 poet's work in other ways that it is still personal and 
 particular with this element of local speech left out. 
 What would J. M. Synge's plays be without the Irish 
 idiom he employs? But in this matter, Synge's 
 was the easier task, for Irish can be written accept- 
 ably without changing ordinary spelling, and Yankee 
 dialect cannot. It is commonly said that an author 
 adds many decades to his literary life, and widens 
 his appeal at the time of writing, \^ he does not use- 
 dialect. I would amend that dictiim by suggesting 
 that it depends upon the author. Scott's novels are 
 very little read, it is true, but that is less because so 
 many of them are in dialect, as that they are all so 
 largely mere fustian,_a sort of material which is apt 
 to become moth-eaten with time. Burns's dialect 
 poems, on the other hand, are still much read and 
 cherished. / As it is, Mr. Frost has succeeded admi- 
 rably in portraying the New England that he sees. 
 
Robert Frost 127 
 
 What he does not portray is simply what he does 
 not see. 
 
 He sees much, however, both into the hearts of 
 persons, and into the qualities of scenes. How 
 deftly he draws a background. Take this picture : 
 
 We chanced in passing by that afternoon 
 
 To catch it in a sort of mental picture 
 
 Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees, 
 
 Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass, 
 
 The little cottage we are speaking of. 
 
 A front with just a door between two windows. 
 
 Fresh painted by the shower a velvet-black. 
 
 or this, of blueberries : 
 
 It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit, 
 
 I taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot. 
 
 And after all really they're ebony skinned : 
 
 The blue's but a mist from the breath of the wind. 
 
 A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand. 
 
 And less than the tan with which pickers are tanned. 
 
 "The Fear" begins with these lines, and we get not 
 only the picture, but the accompanying noises : 
 
 A lantern light from deeper in the bam 
 Shone on a man and woman in the door 
 And threw their lurching shadows on a house 
 Near by, all dark in every glossy window. 
 A horse's hoofs pawed once the hollow floor. 
 And the back of the gig they stood beside 
 Moved in a little. 
 
128- Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The creak and shift of the wheels is quite plain, 
 although it is not indicated. 
 
 The secret of Mr. Frost's success in such passages 
 as these, lies in his acQurat£_observation, coupled 
 with a perfect simplicity of phrase; the latter, an 
 inheritance from a race brought up on the English 
 "Bible. He tells what he has seen exactly as he has 
 seen it. He is never seduced into subtleties of expres- 
 sion which would be painfully out of place. His 
 words are simple, straightforward, direct, manly, 
 and there is an elemental quality in all he does which 
 would surely be lost if he chose to pursue niceties of 
 pexpression. For Mr. Frost has chosen his medium 
 Lwith an unerring sense of fitness. As there is no 
 strange and explosive imaginative force playing 
 over his subjects, so there is no exotic music pulsing 
 through his verse. 
 
 The poems are written for the most part in blank 
 verse, a blank verse which does not hesitate to leave 
 out a syllable or put one in/Vhenever it feels like it. 
 To the classicist, such liberties would be unendurable. 
 But the method has its advantages. It suggests the 
 hardness and roughness of New England granite. 
 It is halting and maimed like the life it portrays, 
 unyielding in substance, and broken in effect. 
 
 That Mr. Frost has justified the liberties which he 
 has taken with an ancient and dignified metre is 
 evident from the fact that "it has hardly aroused a 
 protes't, even from the classicists. So scholarly a 
 
Robert Frost 129 
 
 critic as Mr. Edward Garnett, praises Mr. Frost's 
 style, and praises it, amusingly enough, for its very 
 I liberties. He says: "so extraordinarily close to nor- 
 mal^everyday speech is it that! anticipate some ac- 
 ademic person may test its metre with a metronome, 
 and declare that the verse is often awkward in its 
 scansion. No doubt. _ But soalso is the blank verse 
 of many a master hard to scan, if the academic foot- 
 rule be not applied with a nice comprehension of 
 where to give and when to take." I say "amusingly 
 enough," because it is always amusing when a 
 classicist l^s to shift his canons to include and 
 justify a beauty he cannot help feeling. But what 
 would the purists of an earlier day have thought of 
 this blank verse ? What would the reviewer who re- 
 viled Keats' s iambic pentameter in the ''Quarterly," 
 have made of Mr. Frost's ? 
 
 Here are a few lines taken at random from "North 
 of Boston": 
 
 ^d ^: :. ; 
 
 Mary' sa^ musing on the lamp-flame at the table. 
 
 The reader will observe that the accent falls shock- 
 ingly (shockingly to that elder taste, I mean) on the 
 second syllable of "Mary," on "on^" and on "at." 
 Here is another : 
 
 I crossed the river and swung round the mountain. 
 
 To make this a passable iambic pentameter line, 
 the "and" has to be stamped into place, but no one 
 
130 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 would ever really read it in that way ; the only possi- 
 ble way to read it is to make the line tetrameter with 
 two iambs, followed by two anapests, the line finish- 
 ing with a feminine ending : 
 
 I crossed / the riv / er and swung / round the moun / tain. 
 What of these two lines : 
 
 She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm 
 That rested on the baniste^and slid downstairs. 
 
 The first line can be made to scan by accenting the 
 "with" of "withdrew," but the second again is 
 obliged to hop along on a couple of anapests to say 
 all it has to say by the end of the line. Perhaps 
 the worst of all is : 
 
 Call her Nausicaa, the unafraid 
 
 in which the feet are obviously trochees not iambs, 
 try it as iambs and listen to the result. But, in 
 pulling these lines to pieces, I am not representing 
 my own view. I agree with Mr. Garnett that these 
 lapses from strict blank verse vary the lines delight- 
 fully, and give a rich and tonic effect. 
 
 In August, 1914, came the war, and on no body 
 of people did the war have a more devastating effect 
 than upon the poets. In the belligerent countries 
 especially, all interest in verse other than war verse 
 vanished for the time. England was no longer the 
 
Robert Frost 131 
 
 soothing and inspiring place for literary workers 
 that it had been. Besides, England had done its 
 work, so far as Robert Frost was concerned. He had 
 come to it unknown, a quasi-failure ; he left it, in 
 March, 1915, with his feet well set upon the ladder 
 of fame. 
 
 I had preceded Mr. Frost to this country by six 
 months, and during that time I had spoken much of 
 "North of Boston." When Mr. Croly, of "The New 
 Republic," asked me to write a paper, and to choose 
 my own subject, I chose "North of Boston," then 
 in the press of Messrs. Henry Holt and Company, 
 but not yet issued, as that subject. 
 
 By a pleasant coincidence, Mr. Frost, whom at 
 that time I had not met, although we had heard 
 much of each other, ran across this review at a book- 
 stall, as he was walking up town from the steamer 
 after landing in New York. He has since told me 
 that it seemed to him when he saw it that America 
 was holding out a friendly hand to welcome him 
 home. America's welcome was more than friendly, 
 it was loyal and enthusiastic. The American edi- 
 tion of "North of Boston" ran through several 
 printings in rapid succession. 
 
 But no success could change Mr. Frost. What 
 did he do on returning to America ? Went promptly 
 back to his hills with the quick certainty of a homing 
 pigeon. He might be able to live on the proceeds 
 of his books, but he had always been a farmer, 
 
132 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 farming seemed the natural and sane order in which 
 his life should run, so he bought a farm in Franconia, 
 New Hampshire, and moved into it during the sum- 
 mer of 1915. 
 
 The next year was spent, partly in writing, a great 
 deal in lecturing, and a very little in actual farming. 
 And now that Mr. Frost has joined the teaching staff 
 of Amherst College, we can see the future of the farm 
 as an emblem rather than as a fact. He might 
 take it as a shield, and crest it with pine-trees, for 
 if it did not yield him a career in one way it has in 
 another. 
 
 Now we have come to Mr. Frost's latest book, 
 published in the Autumn of 1916, "Mountain Inter- 
 val." (Mr. Frost has a rare felicity in choosing 
 titles.) One would like to write at great length 
 about tbis book. But, after all, what is there new to 
 ■~Say ? Mr. Frost is not an author of experiments and 
 surprises. He writes as he has written, but his touch 
 grows surer and more personal with each volume./ 
 
 "Mountain Interval" is a less homogeneous book 
 than "North of Boston." There are in it narra- 
 tives, lyrics, mild bits of irony. A jumble of jot- 
 tings, pages from his portfolio ; excellent in kind, 
 but each quite unrelated to the others. The lyric 
 quality of "A Boy's Will" is here/ but far more 
 developed in expression in such poems as "Pea 
 Brush," "An Encounter," and "The Telephone." 
 There are three long narratives, "In the Home 
 
Robert Frost 133 
 
 Stretch," "The Hill Wife," and "Snow," but al- 
 though these are technically good specimens of the 
 poet's manner, the subjects have neither the depth, 
 nor the poignancy, of those in "North of Boston." 
 Of the three shorter narratives, "Out, Out — " 
 "The Gum Gatherer," and "The Vanishing Red," 
 only one, "Out, Out — " can be said to be up to 
 Mr. Frost's usual standard. But this one, a horrible 
 story of a boy losing his hand in a steam saw, is 
 among the best things of its kind that he has done. 
 The war has registered itself slightly in two poems, 
 "Range-finding," and "The Bonfire." And they 
 are interesting as being the only published work of 
 Mr. Frost's in which any foreign element has dis- 
 turbed the restricted New Hampshire atmosphere. 
 
 On the whole, it must be admitted that in spite of 
 much that is beautiful, this volume will add nothing 
 to the poet's already fine achievement. But neither 
 will it detract ; it is more than adequate, it is excel- 
 lent, but except in the case of the short lyrics, it is 
 not an advance. 
 
 Yet the book contains two poems which are among 
 Mr. Frost's best. "Birches," which I quoted some 
 time ago, and this poem : 
 
 AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT 
 
 All out of doors looked darkly in at him 
 Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars. 
 That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. 
 
134 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 What* kept his eyes from giving back the gaze 
 
 Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. 
 
 What kept him from remembering what it was 
 
 That brought him to that creaking room was age. 
 
 He stood with barrels roimd him — at a loss. 
 
 And having scared the cellar under him 
 
 In clomping there, he scared it once again 
 
 In clomping off ; — and scared the outer night. 
 
 Which has its sounds, familiar, Hke the roar 
 
 Of trees and crack of branches, common things, 
 
 But nothing so like beating on a box. 
 
 A light he was to no one but himself 
 
 Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, 
 
 A quiet light, and then not even that. 
 
 ^e consigned to the moon, such as she was. 
 
 So late-arising, to the broken moon 
 
 As better than the sun in any case 
 
 For such a charge, his snow upon the roof. 
 
 His icicles along the wall to keep ; 
 
 And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt 
 
 Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted. 
 
 And eased his heavy breathing, but stUl slept. 
 
 One aged man — one man — can't fill a house, 
 
 A farm, a countryside, or if he can. 
 
 It's thus he does it of a winter night. 
 
 Nowhere in Mr. Frost's work is there a finer thing 
 than that, in spite of the false accent in the eigh- 
 teenth line. There is sound, and sight, and sugges- 
 tion, and all painting surely eind reticently the tragedy 
 of lonely old age. The poem is superb ; with what 
 
Robert Frost 135 
 
 it says and what it does not say. Mr. Frost is gain- 
 ing in subtlety, but sometimes this subtlety ends in 
 the blind alley of obscurity. ,/H.e is never cryptic, in 
 the way that Mr. Robinson is cryptic, but he some- 
 times ends a poem abruptly with a smile, as though 
 he said, "You see the end, so I won't read you the 
 last page." /And sometimes we do not see the end, 
 as in "The Fear," it may be one of two ends, or, 
 perchance, there really is no end at all, only a per- 
 petual continuation. 
 
 In looking back over the three volumes which 
 make up Mr. Frost's poetical output at present, we 
 ask ourselves, what place does he hold among his 
 contemporaries ? I should say that he has gained a 
 success in his chosen field which can be equalled by 
 no other poet in our series.P But his canvas is- 
 exceedingly small, and no matter how wonderfully he 
 paints upon it, he cannot attain to the position held 
 by men with a wider range of vision?] As Jane 
 Austen is perfect in her way, still we cannot rank 
 her with Shakespeare; nor can Theocritus ever be 
 considered as great as Homer. Mr. Frost's work is 
 undoubtedly more finished in its kind than the 
 work of any other living American poet, but this very" 
 finish precludes growth. In some other poets we 
 feel potentialities, in Mr. Frost we find achievement. 
 [ Mr. Robinson represents realism ; with a much 
 broader imaginatiorithan-Mrr-Frost, this force is 
 nevertheless held in check by an innate pessimism 
 
136 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 which makes the real seem important and the visions 
 of imagination almost frivolous. Mr. Frost is 
 realism touched to fire by idealization, but in the 
 final count, and in spite of its great beauty, it re- 
 jnains realism. We have no such rare imaginative 
 bursts from him as Mr. Masefield gives us time and 
 again in "The Dauber"; for instance, the descrip- 
 tion of the flying fishes. 
 
 Mr. Frost writes down exactly what he sees. But, 
 being a true poet, he sees it vividly and with a charm 
 which translates itself into a beautiful simplicity of 
 expression. He is an eminently sympathetic poet. 
 He wins first by his gentle understanding, and his 
 strong and unsentimental power of emotion ; later, 
 we are conquered by his force, and moved to admira- 
 tion by his almost unapproachable technique. Still, 
 his imagination is bounded by his life, he is confined 
 within the limits of his experience (or at least what 
 might have been his experience) and bent all one 
 way like the wind-blown trees of New England hill- 
 sides. After all, art is rooted in the soil, and only 
 the very greatest men can be both cosmopolitan and 
 great; Mr. Frost is as New England as Bums is 
 Scotch, Synge Irish, or Mistral Provengal,/and it is 
 perhaps not too much to say that he is the equal of 
 these poets, and will so rank to future generations. 
 
EDGAR LEE MASTERS 
 
 AND 
 
 CARL SANDBURG 
 
EDGAR LEE MASTERS 
 
 AND 
 
 CARL SANDBURG 
 
 Mr. Masters is the author of a number of books, 
 but one has made his fame ; and it seems probable 
 that only one will outlive the destructive work of 
 time. But this one is so remarkable that it may very 
 well come to be considered among the great books 
 of American literature. I refer, of course, to "The 
 Spoon River Anthology." I think it is not too much 
 to say that no book, in the memory of the present 
 generation, has had such a general effect upon the 
 reading community as has this. Every one who 
 reads at all has read it. . Its admirers are not con- 
 fined to those who like poetry, people who have 
 never cared for a poem before are enthusiastic over 
 "Spoon River," while professed poetry lovers stand, 
 some aghast and some delighted, but all interested 
 and amazed. Everf its enemies admit it to be extraor- 
 dinary. It has been characterized as an American 
 "Com6die Humaine," but I think Dostoevsky in 
 vers libre would be more accurate. Mr. Masters' 
 
 139 
 
140 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 habit of thought is more akin to the Russian than 
 to the French. In fact, Mr. Masters is in some ways 
 closer to the Swede, August Strindberg, than to 
 any other modern writer. 
 
 Of course, analogies of this kind must not be 
 pushed too far. If Mr. Masters resembles Balzac 
 in the fecundity he shows in inventing characters 
 and lives to fit them, he is also like Strindberg in 
 shewing only a narrow stratum of society. If he 
 is like Balzac in confining his mise en scbne in a small 
 compass, he is again like Strindberg in being primarily 
 interested in one important phase of life — that of 
 sex. Balzac was no poet, but he realized that man 
 is impelled by many motives ; in Strindberg, the 
 actions of the characters are all dependent upon 
 their sex impulses. Mr. Master s is a poet , but he 
 too sees life t hroug h themedium of sex."" Ferhaps 
 no author writing in America to-day shows more 
 clearly the breaking down of an old traction, the 
 effect on the Anglo-Saxon mind of much contact 
 with the minds of other peoples. 
 
 In Mr. Robinson and Mr. Frost, we saw the break- 
 ing down of tradition, but in both poets the tra- 
 ditional racial characteristics remained unaltered ; 
 in Mr. Masters, tradition is not only breaking, but 
 broken, and the racial type is quite altered. 
 
 /All racial changes begin by, a disappearance, a 
 slow fading of the fundamental beliefs upon which 
 that particular civilization was reared, but the results 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 141 
 
 of these beliefs still retain their hold upon the people 
 brought up in them. The next step finds the beliefs 
 so much a thing of the past that they have no power 
 to mould character, and the result, for the moment, 
 is a sort of mental chaos, in which cynicism becomes 
 a dominant attitude, in many cases ending in down- 
 right despair. The third stage is that in which the 
 change is so complete that it no longer requires to be 
 considered as such at all./ The old tradition has 
 passed into the line of history, and departure from 
 it is the rule not the exception. Men have reared 
 new beliefs, are living upon other planes of thought, 
 and that being for the moment settled, they are 
 able to turn their attention to other things," for 
 insjiance : Beauty. ' 
 
 In the first stage, beauty is a thing \remembered 
 and haunting ; in the third stage, it is re-discovered 
 and intoxicating ; but in the second, it is crowded 
 out by tljieif tress of travail', by the pangs of a birth 
 which has riot yet occurred. / 
 
 The truth is that America is in the making, and 
 as poets are the articulate part of a community, we 
 see this change very clearly in the work of the modern 
 poets. If this is a true \poetical "movement," as I 
 believe it to be, it is so bfecause of the basic changes 
 going on in the poets themselves, and to a lesser 
 degree in the large body of the people. What the 
 American nation will eventually be, none of us 
 living in this moment of flux can possibly foretell. 
 
142 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 But there appear in the work of a few of our poet 
 hints of a new beauty, a differing religious concepi 
 which may herald the slow approach of the thin 
 stage. That third stage, that era of accomplish 
 ment which will endure until another "movement' 
 shakes the world again and mankind takes anothe 
 step on its eternal path. 
 
 , I have said that Mr. Robinson and Mr. Fros 
 represent various things in the "new movement" - 
 Realism, Direct Speech, Simplicity, and the like 
 They represent also the first stage of the progressioi 
 I have been analyzing. Mr. Masters, who als 
 stands for other things as well, embodies the seconi 
 ^ stage. / have put him and Mr. Sandburg togethe 
 principally for that reason, although they hav 
 other points of contact besides this one. /We ma; 
 regard the work of these two poets as being the mos 
 revolutionary that America has yet producer 
 And here I want to make the distinction betwee 
 "revolutionary" and "evolutionary." 
 
 Evolution is growing into, revolution is violent! 
 and consciously opposing something in order to brin 
 about something else. In my last chapter, I sha 
 speak of two poets who may properly be said to b 
 entering upon the last stage of- this "movement," an 
 whose work may very well be called evolutionary. 
 
 Of course, this dividing a movement into section 
 has nothing to do with the merit of the individuE 
 poets, but a consideration of it as a whole helps u 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 143 
 
 to understcind its reasons for being, and, through it, 
 the work of the poets who make it. 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters was bom at Garnet, Kansas, 
 on August 23, 1869, where his father, who had 
 been admitted to the bar shortly before that date, 
 was practising law. 
 
 The Masters family is said to have come to Massa- 
 chusetts from England in the seventeenth century, 
 one branch going to Nova Scotia and one to Virginia. 
 The poet is descended from the Virginia branch, his 
 great-great-grandfather, Hillary Masters, being a 
 soldier in the Continental Army during the Revolu- 
 tion, mustered in from Wythe County, Virginia. 
 
 At what period the family, or a part of it, moved 
 from Virginia to Tennessee is not recorded. But 
 Davis Masters, a grandson of the Revolutionary 
 soldier, was born in the latter state, where he married 
 a certain Lucinda Young, the grand-daughter of 
 another Revolutionary soldier from North Carolina. 
 These two migrated into Illinois during the 'twenties 
 of the last century, and settled first in Morgan 
 County, where their son, the poet's father, Hardin 
 Wallace Masters, was born, and later in Menard 
 County, living there to the advanced ages of ninety- 
 two and ninety-six, respectively. 
 
 It will be see n that the poet comes of a sturdy 
 stedrl md a ^S p^""? ""^- A stock which ha s 
 giT moving ever Westward, to newer_ cf«der. freer 
 lands! From Massachusetts to Virginia, from Vir- 
 
144 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 ginia to Tennessee, from Tennessee to Illinois. For 
 two centuries, the exodus continued. ] ^ver r egjang, 
 never -itnj'inrnjnrrgflil fnllT, onft nnt afraid of hard 
 and yet^^^uricai s l y ono ttg^^uaaM e - to otril e c 
 ter¥G©te-inte any soil deep enough to have it hold 
 them for long. One can see this race, developing 
 those rugged qualities needed to cope Avith a nature 
 still unsubdued ; harsh, powerful, perpetually re- 
 sisting conditions, always dominating them, but not 
 quite enough to deaden the lure of new and farther 
 places just beyond the horizon. 
 
 On his mother's side, Mr. Masters also inherits the 
 ^ tradition of force. ;!For his mother is of the narrow, 
 stem, bigotedly religious folk who still linger in New 
 England, particularly in the rural districts/ A fine 
 people, with high moral qualities, as I have pointed 
 out in my chapters on Mr. Robinson and Mr. Frost, 
 but more strong than graceful, more firm than widely 
 comprehending. Her father, the Reverend Deming 
 S. Dexter, was a Methodist minister in the town of 
 Marlborough, New Hampshire. He died in 1870. 
 His wife, Jerusha, was a descendant of the long 
 line of Putnams, whose name appears so often and 
 so variously in the pages of New England history 
 — gloriously, in the case of General Israel Putnam, 
 of the Battle of Bunker Hill ; with sinister import, 
 when we speak of Anne Putnam, who, with her 
 father and mother, was chiefly responsible for the 
 outbreak of witchcraft at Salem. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 145 
 
 Where Mr. Hardin Masters met his wife, I do not 
 know, possibly she was one of that series of New ' 
 England school-mistresses who gave their lives to 
 educate the West. At any rate, the poet says that 
 he never saw either of his maternal grand-parents. 
 
 Mr. Davis Masters, a true agricultural pioneer, 
 looked somewhat askance at his son's passion for 
 the law. He wished him to be a farmer. He, 
 himself, had found prosperity in the rich farm lands 
 of Illinois, and he wanted his son to follow in his 
 footsteps. For a time he prevailed, and when the 
 poet was a year old his parents left Garnet and 
 returned to the homestead in Illinois. 
 
 Mr. Masters tells us that this old house is his 
 earliest memory. Dim recollections of it rise in his"" 
 mind from a time when he can scarcely be supposed 
 to remember at all. He has a vision of a sofa upon 
 which a woman is lying. An aunt of his was ill for 
 seven years, and he was often taken to her in his 
 grandmother's arms, but whether he really remem- 
 bers this, or has visualized a later knowledge, it is 
 impossible to say. Another recollection, and a 
 much clearer one, is of sitting in his mother's lap in 
 a fence corner and watching windrows of corn-stalks 
 ablaze, as they were lit, one after another, by his 
 father. 
 
 Some two years after his parents' return to Illinois, 
 Mr. Davis Masters bought a farm for his son, hoping 
 by so doing to remove him forever from politics and 
 
146 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 the law. But natural bents are often too strong for 
 paternal regulation. Mr. Hardin Masters was 
 elected State Attorney, and he and his family 
 moved to Petersburg. Here it was that Edgar Lee 
 Masters began to go to school. His grandfather's 
 farm was only six miles from the town, and he 
 spent much time there, riding horses, fishing, work- 
 ing in the garden, and burrowing in old chests of 
 books stored away in the garret, a place which he 
 had christened "The Dark Ages." The pioneers of 
 this country were anything but uneducated people. 
 They were not peasants in the countries from which 
 they came, but God-fearing, middle-class folk, 
 brought up on the English Bible and "Pilgrim's 
 Progress." When we remember that one of the 
 first things they did in this new country was to 
 - foun dXcolIe ge, we can see what temp erof men they 
 were! As~they moved Westward, their small and 
 carefully hoarded stock of books was packed with 
 the household goods for reading during the long 
 Winter evenings when there was nothing else to do. 
 The facile amusements and the cheap printing of the 
 present day are responsible for many things ; , among 
 others, the deterioration of literary taste. 
 
 There were many books in "The Dark Ages" — 
 Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, Moore — and the boy 
 read them all with the omnivorous appetite of 
 youth. This early reading does more to form a 
 writer's style than anything else in the world. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 147 
 
 No matter how individual he may become, contact 
 with " the best that has been thought and said in the 
 world" gives him a command of language that later 
 study can never bestow. Mr. Masters says that his 
 grandfather spoke "with a patriarchal eloquence at 
 once clear, vigorous, and charming," and that "both 
 in speech and in writing he had formed himself 
 upon the Bible." 
 
 When he was eleven years old, the boy was taken 
 from the public schools and sent for a short time to 
 a private German school. He was not there long 
 enough to acquire more than a slight reading acquaint- 
 ance with the German language, and certainly not 
 long enough to gain /the Teutonic virtues of method 
 and thoroughness. /With his particular characteris- 
 tics, it is certain that the Teutonic was the last influ- 
 ence under which Mr. Masters should have come. 
 He needed clarity, taste, and delicacy, and none of 
 these are German traits. / In fact, these particular 
 things have never been a part of Mr. Masters' 
 schooling. So little indeed, that he does not seem 
 to recognize his lack of them. 
 
 Before long, his father moved to Lewiston, and 
 the boy experienced his first radical change of 
 atmosphere. Lewiston was fifty miles from his 
 grandfather's farm, and had it not been for periodic 
 attacks of illness, the little boy would probably have 
 been cut off entirely from farm life. As it was, 
 however, he made long visits there every Spring, and 
 
148 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 so constantly renewed his acquaintance with fields 
 and woods, and the kindly activities of farm life. 
 
 When Mr. Masters was about fourteen years old, 
 there came to Lewiston as assistant to the Principal 
 of the High School a certain Mary Fisher. This 
 lady, who in later life wrote some books of local 
 fame, had come in contact, through a friend, with 
 the activities of that group of New England women of 
 which Louisa May Alcott was one. It was a rather 
 washed-out and faded intellectual atmosphere, but 
 to the young Western woman it seemed like the 
 very Elixir of Life, and turned her interests definitely 
 to literature. So ardent was she in the cause that 
 she succeeded in imbuing her pupils with the same 
 a rdour. She wa s-iml^Jn Lewiston a year, but dur- 
 ing that year she plante d tiieJoye__aL-Iitera£uie 
 definitely in the heart of Edgar Lee Masters. Before 
 that, he had been a careless student, now he began 
 to read in earnest. At first it was a desultory reading, 
 but three years later he suddenly braced himself for 
 effort and worked hard to finish his High School 
 course. 
 
 Like so many boys, he found the mechanical art of 
 printing attractive, ajid he had almost learnt the. 
 printer's trade before he was fourteen. At seventeen, 
 he graduated from the High School and took up. 
 printing for a time, writing also for the local papers, 
 corresponding for Chicago, Peoria, and St. Louis - 
 papers, writing poetry, essays, and short stories ; 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 149 
 
 rAhe reading was bearing fruit, that abortive fruit, 
 ithered before it is ripe, which wrecks so many 
 5ver youths, y 
 
 It is hardly necessary here to recapitulate the 
 uism that our educational systems in America do 
 )t educate. And this is particularly true of our 
 igh Schools. A smattering of many subjects is 
 )t education, and Edgar Masters' mind at this 
 ncture was a lamentable jumble of smatterings, 
 was like a Christmas tree, hung with bits of tinsel 
 unrelated splotches. To a certain extent, this is 
 Lie_o f the poet _of to-day. His mind glitters , but 
 "is~^ithoxit_cohesieai— - 
 
 'Mr. Hardin— Masters regarded these literary 
 tivities with anything but a sympathetic eye. 
 This newspaper work," as he called it, would not 
 ». On general principles he was right, foryfournal- «- 
 n is seldom the portal to literature. An embryonic 
 ithor had better spend his days in selling buttons 
 an in writing down to popular taste. / How could 
 r. Masters, senior, know that he was dealing with 
 genius, whose mental processes must not be inter- 
 red with. No such prophetic vision was vouch- 
 fed to the clever lawyer so sure of his prominence 
 the little growing town. Following his own 
 ther's example, he wished to rule the destinies of 
 3 son. He was trying to snatch this son from liter- 
 ure and make a lawyer of him, as his father had 
 ied to snatch him from the law and turn him into a 
 
150 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 farmer. But the Masters family is a race of individ- 
 ualists ; they must be what the gods deci de. Mr. 
 H^din Masters'was partly successful, but the gods 
 have won the ultimate game, for they have simply 
 turned his desires to their own ends. 
 
 So Edgar Lee Masters started to read Blackstone 
 and other law books, without, however, giving up 
 his reading in other fields and his constant scribbling. 
 At nineteen, he took up the study of Latin, but did 
 not abandon his law ; in fact, he was now well em- 
 barked on the dual career of letters and law which he 
 has pursued ever since. 
 
 Other artists have followed two professions, appar- 
 ently without detriment to either. Henry Fielding 
 was an eminent lawyer and judge ; Chaucer was a 
 county magistrate ; Shakespeare was a hack play- 
 wright and actor in a stock company ; one Russian 
 composer, Borodine, was an eminent physician, 
 director of a hospital, and author of a monumental 
 work on chemistry ; another, Rimsky-Korsakov, was 
 an officer in the Russian navy. One could go on for 
 long multiplying these examples. Doubtless, it is 
 always difficult to follow two vocations at the same 
 time. It requires a doubly rounded talent, and a 
 profound habit of concentration. 
 
 Now concentration is one of the chief things whidl 
 American educational systems do not inculcate. > 
 Mr. Masters' note-books of this period show that 
 he was £ui enthusiastic reader, but the soil had not 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 151 
 
 been properly tilled in which the seed was dropped. 
 Facts ! — the young man's mind was stored with 
 facts. But the facts settled into no systematic 
 order, they connoted only themselves and not their 
 places in a general scheme. First one study at- 
 tracted him, then another, but each was followed 
 for its own sake, not for its bearing upon the 
 whole. 
 
 It is hard for a young man to learn by himself, 
 with no wise and mellow guidance to keep a chosen 
 end constantiy before him. Few people are bom 
 with so decided a bent that they must pursue it 
 without excursions hither and yon. Other systems 
 than our American one temper knowledge with 
 counsel, with the experience of men who have gone 
 before. But where was Edgar Lee Masters to find 
 such counsel and such experience? His teachers 
 were almost as crude as himself, men who had 
 mastered their subjects and that was all. Legal 
 advice and experience he could get, but a legal advice 
 which gave no consideration to his literary aspira- 
 tions. His early life is a record of wa ridering. F irst 
 he would tollow one road, then hewould ret raoeJiis 
 steps and go down anotiier, only to cut across coun - 
 — try-baclcToTHe^rst, to leave that again farther on, 
 jump over a stone wall, and regain the second. It 
 was inevitable; and if the direction at times seemed 
 lost, that was illusion. It was a steady progress, 
 although a slow and meandering one. 
 
152 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 When Mr. Masters was twenty-one, the literary 
 impulse asserteditselt too strongly to be denied," 
 and his father consented to send him to Knox College 
 for a year. Here he took up Greek, continued his 
 Latin, and resumed the German abandoned so many 
 years before. But how much of anything can one 
 learn in a year? Probably the libraries did more 
 for the poet than the class-rooms, for he read the 
 Greek dramatists. Homer, Virgil, Goethe, and also 
 dipped into philosophy and criticism. 
 
 Had Mr. Masters been an English lad, a French, 
 a German, all these studies would probably have had 
 constructive results. But in the West, at that date, 
 they made themselves chiefly evident by a vague 
 unrest. They set the poet apart from his fellows, 
 and engendered a questioning, carping habit of mind. 
 They set his feet on the road to adventure, and lured 
 him along a path of unrelieved monotony. 
 
 At the end of one year, Mr. Masters returned to 
 Lewiston, resumed his law studies, and was admitted 
 to the bar. For a year he practised with his father, 
 then circumstances impelled him to seek his fortune 
 in Chicago. The chief of these was the terrible 
 monotony I have mentioned. In his own words, 
 "the pathos of the count ry depressed my imagina- 
 tionin3eSCf i^ blv. " ._ 
 
 A poet teeds on beauty as a plant feeds on air. 
 To see the beauty, to grasp the epic meaning, of our 
 small Western cities requires maturity and a life 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 153 
 
 / 
 spent in sympathetic observation. ^*The poet must«a^ 
 
 himself provide the touchstone which will fuse the 
 crude elements into a plastic and symbolic whole/ 
 The author of " Spoon_ ^iver " has don e this more 
 cdnnrfgl^lv ttiarTanvot her living man. But it was 
 "37ears yeftefoiFe such a thing could be. In the mean 
 time, he thirsted for colour, for music, for joy, and 
 could find them nowhere about him. Background 
 means much to a poet, and here there was no back- 
 ground, suitable to the moment, that is. 
 — L,believe t hat this struggle , this constant warring 
 of a spirit in pain, h as left its lasting mark upon th e 
 poet. The ugliness, the bitterness, the materialism, 
 with which he believed himself surrounded, have been 
 burnt into his soul, so that now he gives them out 
 perforce. There are hints of beauty in his poems, 
 but they are almost smothered under other things, 
 ^ere is strength, vigour, vividness ; here, too, is ^ 
 coarseness, brutality, cynicism ; here is compelling 
 originality; but of the subtle forces of artistic balance, 
 penetrating sensibility, beauty of fonn and syllable, 
 (^^ggestion, there is scarcely a trace. / j 
 
 What is strange about this, however, is that while 
 circumstances were forcing him one way, it was in 
 quite another that he would have progressed if he 
 could. Speaking of what turned his thoughts to 
 poetry, he has said : "It was ifiusic running through 
 ray brain, my first passion was Bums and afterwards 
 Shelley." 
 
154 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 He knew what he needed, longed for it, hungered 
 for it, and because he did not get it at that time, his 
 poetry will probably always be without it. 
 
 Is this a fault ? In his verse, I hardly think so. I 
 am inclined to doubt if his poetry would have the 
 same stark reality were the form more mellifluous and 
 suave. Whitman, too, was portraying a pioneer 
 civilization, and he found a free, almost rough, 
 rhythmical prose the best instrument to his purpose. 
 One can hardly figure that a statuette of a back- 
 woodsman cut in jade would have a happy effect. 
 Possibly this is the reason that so many poets who 
 have attempted to write of the West in the old 
 forms have failed. I only say "perhaps," for in 
 the hands of genius foma is plastic ; but it is also a 
 sign of genius to know what form intrinsically fits the 
 subject in hand. Mr. Masters has expressed this idea 
 in a somewhat exaggerated manner in his " Petit, the 
 Poet." The exaggeration lies in the fact that Petit 
 is not a poet, but a poetaster ; it is true criticism, 
 nevertheless. 
 
 PETIT, THE POET 
 
 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick. 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel — 
 
 Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens — 
 
 But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. 
 
 Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, 
 
 Ballades by the score with the same old thought : * 
 
 The snows and the roses of yesterday si& vanished ; 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 155 
 
 And what is love but a rose that fades ? 
 
 Life all around me here in the village : 
 
 Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, 
 
 Courage, constancy, heroism, failure — 
 
 All in the loom, and oh what patterns ! 
 
 Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers — 
 
 Blind to all of it all my life long. 
 
 Triolets, vUlanelles, rondels, rondeaus, 
 
 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, 
 
 While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines ? 
 
 At the time Mr. Masters went to Chicago he had 
 already written about four hundred poems. These 
 were, to quote their author once more, " the products 
 of moods, psychic states, attempts to reproduce 
 music, or interpret the moods produced by music. 
 More poems came to nie as sounds. Sometimes as 
 vision, but mostly as sound. The idea was negligi- 
 ble. I was working under the influence of Poe, 
 Shelley, Keats : sometimes as to nature poems, look- 
 ing to Theocritus. I wrote many sonnets and many 
 vague things in the music of Swinburne." 
 
 Four hundred poems before one is twenty-three 
 is certainly a goodly count, but/ike all the products ^ 
 of immature fecundity they were abortive. / The poet 
 had not found himself, and it was to be more than 
 twenty years before he, did so. Meanwhile, this 
 •faifure to be what he desired threw him into a sort of 
 spiritual despair. He jwagjn rohellinn hpranse h% 
 
156 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 had not been able to control his career, to finish his 
 college course, to pursue his literary studies without 
 interruption. 
 
 He wanted to be a writer, but, after all, what was 
 there in writing ? He must live, and writing is not 
 well paid until one has already made a success at it. 
 He was a lawyer, he could practise law and still 
 write. He could pursue two careers, constantly 
 chafing at the one which supported him, constantly 
 failing at the one upon which his heart was set. 
 Meanwhile, the law upheld him and he prospered 
 at it, which added the gall of irony to an already 
 embittered situation. 
 
 In 1895, he wrote a blank verse play on Benedict 
 Arnold, and, in 1898, he selected some sixty poems 
 out of his four hundred and published them through 
 the firm of Way and Williams in Chicago. Neither 
 the poems nor the play attracted any attention. 
 Truth to tell, they did not deserve it, and their 
 complete failure served to throw Mr. Masters back 
 on his law with an increased interest. He could be 
 a good lawyer ; he was a good lawyer ; and for a time 
 he put all his energies into that scale, working with 
 unsparing industry. 
 
 About this time, the poet married, and shortly 
 after entered the political cu-ena. The campaign of 
 1896 stirred him deeply ; the campaign of 1900 had 
 a still greater effect, and, in 191 1, he published a* 
 volume of political essays. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 157 
 
 But the love of literature was not dead, merely 
 overlaid. In 1902, he had printed another play 
 in verse, "Maximilian," which, having no better 
 success than "Benedict Arnold," decided him to try 
 his hand at prose drama, and, with his usual fecun- 
 dity, he promptly wrote eight prose plays, hoping 
 by their production to make enough money to settle 
 down and devote himself entirely to literature. 
 But none of the eight succeeded in winning a hear- 
 ing. Also, three little volumes of poems, published 
 under pseudonyms in 1905, 1910, and 1912, respec- 
 tively, met with no better reception. Certainly, 
 whom the gods love, they first chastise. 
 
 It is cruel to have to admit that these set-backs 
 were Mr. Masters' fault as well as his misfortune. 
 They were the result of the unrelated, uncriticy 
 temper of his mind. He had no t found himself, 
 had not realize d wherein lay his re al power. Seeing" 
 a world before him in which no single thing had 
 hardened to a certainty, a world of flux and recoil, 
 a world of experiments and change, he gave to his 
 environment, drifted, returned, floated hither and 
 thither, his feet striking only the hard ground of 
 politics and law as a support. For want of a better 
 resting place they stuck there and gradually the 
 poet's head lifted above the waters, gradually he 
 came to himself, and so standing, set himself to solid- 
 M.iy, to order, the chaos about him. 
 
 A poet's method of ordering a thing is to throw a 
 
158 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 strong light upon it. To fling it into relief, so that, 
 being seen, it may be attacked and altere^or cher- 
 ished and protected, as the case may h&^ K revolu- 
 tionary poet, a poet bent upon revaluing the civiliza- 
 tion in which he finds himself, has no stronger weapon 
 than this glare of vivid words. Mr. Masters is a 
 r evolu tionary poet, he has bee n caught in th e socio- 
 logical wave whicIThas been sweeping over the world 
 ot late years. Without any definite idea oFhow a 
 better state of things is to be brought about, he 
 nevertheless ardently desir es one. He has infi nite 
 sym ^ l l i y f oi <4TPT?arrif^d 7monotonous lives of uglv , 
 ^ little town s. /But he sees them through a bitter 
 mist; misery can cramp souls as well as bodies, and 
 if it sometimes has the opposite effect of ennobling 
 them, this Mr. Masters is in too great a haste to see. 
 His is not a vision to note nuances, he sees things 
 broadly, flatTy^hiif hp yps tViPim w'th extraord inary 
 
 precisidnand clarity 
 
 ity/ 
 
 Constantly r amng, con stantly persisting, Mr. 
 Masters' literary life is one long record of indomitable 
 pluck. And all the time, through early associations, 
 through his law practice, through his political encoun- 
 ters, he was laying aside the material out of which 
 his real work was to be fashioned. 
 
 While Mr. Masters continued to imitate the forms, 
 and to a certain extent the thoughts, of the older 
 poets, his writing was negligible, he seemed unable 
 to express even a small part of what was in him. But 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 159 
 
 a release was in sight. Mr. Masters belongs among 
 those poets who take their forms ready made, merely 
 adapting them slightly to ease the thought they are 
 to contain. This fact is no aspersion on a poet's 
 genius. Shakespeare belonged to this class. In- 
 deed, it is doubtful if poetical experimenters ever 
 bring their experiments to the finest flowering. They 
 widen possibilities, but the ultimate beauty of their 
 aim lies in other hands. 
 
 In 191 1, Miss Harriet Monroe, of Chicago, a cul- 
 tivated woman, a poet and a writer on art, conceived 
 the idea of starting a poetry magazine. Faith will 
 move mountains, and Miss Monroe's undaunted 
 enthusiasm promptly secured a list of guarantors, and 
 a fund was raised to endow such a periodical for 
 five years. The first number was issued in October, 
 1912, and so "Poetry, A Magazine of. Verse," came 
 into being. From the ^rst, Miss Monroe's object 
 was to give a hearing to young poets, to open the 
 door to sincere experimenters. It was to be a forum 
 in which youth could thrash out its ideas, and suc- 
 ceed or fail according to its deserts, unhampered 
 by the damp blanket of obscurity. 
 
 The vers libre movement was then in its infancy ; 
 a number of poets were experimenting with this 
 form, btit very little that they did had yet been pub- 
 lished. The older established magazines always 
 look askance upon anything new, and the whole 
 new movement with which we are dealing in this 
 
i6o Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 book was seething for years beneath the surface 
 before such periodicals took cognizance of its being. 
 There is nothing unusual in such a state of things, but 
 it makes Miss Monroe's magazine all the more impor- 
 tant. " Poetry" did not bring about the movement, 
 it happened on a lucky wave of time, that is all. 
 But it undoubtedly did bring the movement to recog- 
 nition some years earlier than would otherwise have 
 been the case. Poets are not sporadic outbursts, 
 they are the results of obscure causes. The same 
 causes which produced the poets, produced Miss 
 Monroe and her magazine. 
 
 I shall go into this subject more at length in the 
 next essay on the Imagists. Here I only wish to 
 point out that "Poetry" published many vers litre 
 poems during the first years of its existence, and Mr. 
 Masters has often said that it was these poems which 
 opened for him the way to "Spoon River." In 
 fact, they gave him the clue to just what he needed — 
 freedom from the too patterned effects of rhyme 
 and metre, brevity, and conciseness. Such a form 
 seemed absolutely made for his purpose. Sub- 
 stance he had never lacked, fitting his substance to 
 these short, sharp lines gave him a perfect in- 
 strument. 
 
 What suggested the idea of the anthology, I do 
 not know, possibly he took it from the "Greek 
 Anthology" ; I shall show later how analogous much 
 of "Spoon River" is to that famous volume. The 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg i6i 
 
 idea of epitaphs grew naturally out of the succinct 
 brevity of the form, much in little, and in this very 
 brevity Mr. Masters has found his happiest expres- 
 sion. Of course, a vers libre poem is not necessarily 
 short, it may or may not be, as the author chooses. 
 But the first poems in this form published by "Poe- 
 try" happened to be so, and that was fortunate for 
 Mr. Masters. Had he attempted long poems in this 
 medium in the beginning, I fear he would have 
 wrecked "Spoon River" at the start. He has writ- 
 ten many long vers libre poems sinCe, but none of them 
 has attained the rounded strength of the shorter, 
 earlier pieces. 
 
 For many years, Mr. Masters had been sending 
 work to " Reedy's Mirror," St. Louis. Now, in 1914, 
 he sent a batch of these new attempts. The editor, 
 Mr. William Marion Reedy, at once detected the 
 rugged, vigorous note in them. For a whole year 
 he published them, a few in each number, and 
 with each number they attracted more and more 
 attention. 
 
 At the end of the year, Mr. Masters collected them 
 in a volume, entitled "The Spoon River Anthology," 
 which was published by The Macmillan Company in 
 April, 1915. The furore with which the book was 
 received is unprecedented in the annals of American 
 poetry. It went into edition after edition in a few 
 months. Mr. Masters was hailed as the successor 
 to Walt Whitman, as the creator of a purely 
 
1 62 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 American verse. Fame had come at last, after 
 all the years in which the poet had assiduously 
 courted her. 
 
 Spoon River purports to be a small town in the 
 Middle West. It is said that Hanover, Illinois, served 
 as its prototype. The poems ^re supposed to be the 
 epitaphs in the cemetery of this town. Or rather, 
 it is as if its dead denizens arose, and each speaking 
 the truth, perforce, revealed his own life exactly as 
 it had been, and the real cause of his death. When 
 I add that there are two _hundred_and_fQiirteen of 
 these people, we can see what a colossal study of 
 character the book is. The mere inventing of two 
 hundred and fourteen names is a staggering feat. 
 How many names Balzac invented, or Scott, or 
 Shakespeare, or Moliere, I have not an idea, but the 
 work of these men extended over a lifetime ; Mr. 
 Masters' two hundred and fourteen were all col- 
 lected in one year. 
 
 The quality of the book already stands revealed 
 in these names. They are uncompromisine in their 
 realism ; hard, cr ude, completely loc al. Mr. Mas- 
 ters pmnTteTumself no subterfuges with fact. He 
 throws no glamour over his creations. We hear of 
 noFlammondes, no Bokardos, instead are Hannah 
 Armstrong, Archibald Higbie, Bert Killion, Faith 
 Matheny, Jennie M'Grew, Reuben Pantier, Albert 
 Schirding, George Trimble, Oaks Tutt, Zenas Witt, 
 and a host of others. What are these names? 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 163 
 
 Some are Anglo-Saxon, some are clearly German; 
 one, "Russian Sonia," tells of an origin, if not dis- 
 tinctly national, at least distinctly cosmopolitan ; 
 another, "Yee Bow," is as obviously Chinese. 
 
 We do not find German, French, Chinese names 
 in Mr. Frost's books. Here, therefore, at once, in 
 the table of contents, we are confronted with the 
 piquant realism of locality . /The highest art isO 
 undeniably that which comprises the farthest flights 
 of imagination, but next to that, the most satisfy- 
 ing is the one which holds within it the pungency of 
 place, undiluted./ John M. Synge combines the 
 two to a remarkable extent, it is true, but without 
 this local tang his imagination would not have been 
 strong enough to have sustained him ; and what 
 would Burns have been without Scotland, or The- 
 ocritus without Sicily ? 
 
 I dwelt upon this at some length when we were 
 dealing with the New England of Mr. Frost. But 
 the difference between Mr. Frost and Mr. Masters 
 is not only that they write about different parts of 
 the country, it is a profound divergence of points of 
 view. Mr. Frost, as I said before, belongs to the 
 first stage of the "new movement"; Mr. Masters 
 to the secohd. Mr. Frost records with quiet sym- 
 pathy; Mr. Masters is mordant and denunciatory. 
 Mr. Frost is resigned, smilingly thinking resistance 
 futile ; Mrv Masters resists with every fibre of his 
 being. Mr. Frost's work gives us the effect of a 
 
164 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 constant withdrawal ; Mr. Masters' of a constan t 
 pushing forward;__ 
 
 '*SpoonRiver " is a volume which should be read 
 from the first page to the last. (Always excepting the 
 final poem, "The Spooniad," a dreary effusion, which 
 fits but slightly into the general scheme, and should 
 never have been included.) No idea of its breadth 
 and variety can be gained from fragmentary quota- 
 tions. Each poem is a character, and as the charac- 
 ters multiply, the whole town is gradually built up 
 before us. Other authors have given us characters, 
 other authors have given us cross-sections of a com- 
 munity. But in most books we have a set of primary 
 characters, and the others are forced more or less 
 into the background by the exigencies of the case. 
 We see the life from this or that angle, we do not 
 get it entire. 
 
 In "Spoon River," there are no primary charac- 
 ters, no secondary characters. We have only a 
 town and the people who inhabit it. The Chinese 
 laundry-man is as important to himself as the State's 
 Attorney is to himself. None are forced back to 
 give others prominence, but all together make the 
 town. 
 
 Here are four poems. Three are of a family, and 
 the fourth of the school-teacher who taught the son. 
 The teacher, Emily Sparks, is one of the few fine 
 characters in the book, fine without being at the 
 same time foolish. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 165 
 
 BENJAMIN PANTIER 
 
 Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law, 
 And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend. 
 Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women, 
 Passing one by one out of Ufe, left me till I was alone 
 With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink. 
 In the morning of Ufe I knew aspiration and saw glory. 
 Then she, who survives me, snared my soul 
 With a snare which bled me to death, 
 Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent, 
 Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office. 
 Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig — 
 Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world ! 
 
 MRS. BENJAMIN PANTIER 
 
 I know that he told that I snared his soul 
 With a snare which bled him to death. 
 And all the men loved him. 
 And most of the women pitied him. 
 
 But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes, 
 And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions. 
 And the rhjdihm of Wordsworth's "Ode" runs in your ears, 
 While he goes about from morning till night 
 Repeating bits of that common thing ; 
 "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" 
 And then, suppose ; 
 You are a woman well endowed, 
 And the only man with whom the law and morality 
 Permit you to have the marital relation 
 
1 66 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Is the very man that fills you with disgust 
 
 Every time you think of it — while you think of it 
 
 Every time you see him ? 
 
 That's why I drove him away from home 
 
 To live with his dog in a dingy room 
 
 Back of his oflice. 
 
 REUBEN PANTIER 
 
 Well, Emily Sparks, your prayers were not wasted, 
 
 Your love was not all in vain. 
 
 I owe whatever I was in life 
 
 To your hope that would not give me up, 
 
 To your love that saw me stUl as good. 
 
 Dear Emily Sparks, let me tell you the story. 
 
 I pass the effect of my father and mother ; 
 
 The mUliner's daughter made me trouble 
 
 And out I went in the world, 
 
 "Where I passed through every peril known 
 
 Of wine and women and joy of life. 
 
 One night, in a room in the Rue de Rivoli, 
 
 I was drinking wine with a black-eyed cocotte, 
 
 And the tears swam into my eyes. 
 
 She thought they were amorous tears and smiled 
 
 For thought of her conquest over me. 
 
 But my soul was three thousand miles away, 
 
 In the days when you taught me in Spoon River. 
 
 And just because you no more could love me. 
 
 Nor pray for me, nor write me letters. 
 
 The eternal silence of you spoke instead. 
 
 And the black-eyed cocotte took the tears for hers, 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 167 
 
 As well as the deceiving kisses I gave her. 
 Somehow, from that hour, I had a new vision — 
 Dear Emily Sparks ! 
 
 EMILY SPARKS 
 
 Where is my boy, my boy — 
 
 In what far part of the world ? 
 
 The boy I loved the best of all in the school ? — 
 
 I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart, 
 
 Who made them all my children. 
 
 Did I know my boy aright. 
 
 Thinking of him as spirit aflame, 
 
 Active, ever aspiring ? 
 
 Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed 
 
 In many a watchful hour at night, 
 
 Do you remember the letter I wrote you 
 
 Of the beautiful love of Christ ? 
 
 And whether you ever took it or not, 
 
 My boy, wherever you are. 
 
 Work for your soul's sake. 
 
 That aU the clay of you, aU the dross of you, 
 
 May yield to the fire of you, 
 
 TiU the fire is nothiag but Ught ! . . . 
 
 Nothing but light ! 
 
 Nowhere in the book is the wearing of one charac- 
 ter upon another better described than in those four 
 poems. 
 
 Mr. Masters rnnst antlv shows up the iron v of 
 hypocnsj'^sjn- 
 
1 68 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 NICHOLAS BINDLE 
 
 Were you not ashamed, fellow citizens, 
 
 When my estate was probated and everyone knew 
 
 How small a fortune I left ? — 
 
 You who hounded me in life, 
 
 To give, give, give to the churches, to the poor, 
 
 To the village ! — me who had already given much. 
 
 And think you I did not know 
 
 That the pipe-organ, which I gave to the church. 
 
 Played its christening songs when Deacon Rhodes, 
 
 Who broke the bank and all but ruined me. 
 
 Worshipped for the first time after his acquittal ? 
 
 But there is another kind of irony, more subtle, 
 more penetrating. Mr. Masters seldom attains to 
 it, only rarely does he perceive the force of suggestion, 
 as a rule he is downright and static. But in "Sam 
 Hookey," suggestion is beautifully handled. Little 
 is said ; all is implied : 
 
 SAM HOOKEY 
 
 I ran away from home with the circus, 
 
 Having fallen in love with Mademoiselle Estralada, 
 
 The lion tamer. 
 
 One time, having starved the lions 
 
 For more than a day, 
 
 I entered the cage and began to beat Brutus 
 
 And Leo and Gypsy. 
 
 Whereupon Brutus sprang upon me, 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 169 
 
 And killed me. 
 
 On entering these regions 
 
 I met a shadow who cursed me, 
 
 And said it served me right . . . 
 
 It was Robespierre ! 
 
 It is true, as has been said, that Mr. Masters 
 sees life from the standpoint of the novelist. The 
 material which the novelist spreads out and am- 
 plifies is condensed to its essence in these vignettes 
 of a few lines. In them, Mr. Masters gives us 
 background, character, a nd the inevitable approach 
 ofTnexoraBIeTatel 
 
 COONEY POTTER 
 
 I inherited forty acres from my Father 
 
 And, by working my wife, my two sons and two daughters 
 
 From dawn to dusk, I acquired 
 
 A thousand acres. But not content, 
 
 Wishing to own two thousand acres, 
 
 I bustled through the years with axe and plow. 
 
 Toiling, denying myself, my wife, my sons, my daughters. 
 
 Squire Higbee wrongs me to say 
 
 That I died from smoking Red Eagle cigars. 
 
 Eating hot pie and gulping coffee 
 
 During the scorching hours of harvest time 
 
 Brought me here ere I had reached my sixtieth year. 
 
 This same approach of Fate in a higher sphere, a 
 mental rather than a physical tragedy, appears in 
 "George Gray" : 
 
170 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 GEORGE GRAY 
 
 I have studied many times 
 
 The marble which was chiseled for me — 
 
 A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. 
 
 In truth it pictures not ray destination 
 
 But my life. 
 
 For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment ; 
 
 Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid ; 
 
 Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. 
 
 Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my Hfe. 
 
 And now I know that we must lift the saU 
 
 And catch the winds of destiny 
 
 Wherever they drive the boat. 
 
 To put meaning in one's life may end in madness. 
 
 But life without meaning is the torture 
 
 Of restlessness and vague desire — 
 
 It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid. 
 
 Mr. Ma stgrs has humour of a kind, a robust and 
 rat her brutal kind, it must hp aHmittpH^ hnt g'tiU the 
 quality is there. The humour of juxtaposition is 
 well, if sardonically, handled in this little sketch. 
 
 A. D. BLOOD 
 
 If you in the village think that my work was a good one, 
 Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards, 
 And haled old Daisy Eraser before Justice Amett, 
 In many a crusade to purge the people of sin ; 
 Why do you let the milliner's daughter Dora, 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 171 
 
 And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier, 
 Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow ? 
 
 Here is another juxtaposition spread over two poems : 
 
 ALBERT SCHIRDING 
 
 Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one 
 
 Because his children were aU failures. 
 
 But I know of a fate more trying than that : 
 
 It is to be a failure while your children are successes. 
 
 For I raised a brood of eagles 
 
 Who flew away at last, leaving me 
 
 A crow on the abandoned bough. 
 
 Then, with the ambition to prefix Honorable to my name. 
 
 And thus to win my children's admiration, 
 
 I ran for County Superintendent of Schools, 
 
 Spending my accumulations to win — and lost. 
 
 That fall my daughter received first prize in Paris 
 
 For her picture, entitled, "The Old Mill" — 
 
 (It was of the water mill before Henry Wilking put in steam) 
 
 The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me. 
 
 i^"" JONAS KEENE 
 
 Why did Albert Schirding kiU himself 
 
 Trying to be County Superintendent of Schools, 
 
 Blest as he was with the means of life 
 
 And wonderful children, bringing him honor 
 
 Ere he was sixty ? 
 
 If even one of my boys could have run a news-stand, 
 
 Or one of my girls could have married a decent man, 
 
172 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 I should not have walked in the rain 
 And jumped into bed with clothes all wet, 
 Refusing medical aid. 
 
 The following studies are tragedy looking out 
 through a horrible, grinning mask : 
 
 ELSA WERTMAN 
 
 I was a peasant girl from Geimany, 
 
 Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong. 
 
 And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene's. 
 
 On a summer's day when she was away 
 
 He stole into the kitchen and took me 
 
 Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat, 
 
 I turning my head. Then neither of us 
 
 Seemed to know what happened. 
 
 And I cried for what would become of me 
 
 And I cried and cried as my secret began to show. 
 
 One day Mrs. Greene said she understood. 
 
 And would make no trouble for me, 
 
 And, being childless, would adopt it. 
 
 (He had given her a farm to be still.) 
 
 So she hid in the house and sent out rumors. 
 
 As if it were going to happen to her. 
 
 And all went well and the child was bom — They were so kind to me. 
 
 Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed. 
 
 But — at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was cr3ring 
 
 At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene — 
 
 That was not it. 
 
 No ! I wanted to say : 
 
 That's my son ! That's my son ! 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 173 
 
 HAMILTON GREENE 
 
 I was the only child of Frances Harris of Virginia 
 
 And Thomas Greene of Kentucky, 
 
 Of valiant and honorable blood both. 
 
 To them I owe aU that I became, 
 
 Judge, member of Congress, leader in the State. 
 
 From my mother I inherited 
 
 Vivacity, fancy, language ; 
 
 From my father will, judgment, logic. 
 
 All honor to them 
 
 For what service I was to the people ! 
 
 Mr. Masters, with all his sociological tendencies, 
 does not deify t he working-man as Mr. Sandburg 
 and many other sociological poets .do. He sees life 
 uTtotrroiinded a compass for that. There is much 
 painful truth in this picture, and the last two lines 
 may well become a proverb : 
 
 ; , JOHN HANCOCK OTIS 
 
 As to democracy, fellow citizens, 
 
 Are you not prepared to admit 
 
 That I, who inherited riches and was to the manner bom. 
 
 Was second to none in Spoon River 
 
 In my devotion to the Cause of Liberty ? 
 
 While my contemporary, Anthony Findlay, 
 
 Bom in a shanty and beginning life 
 
 As a water carrier to the section hands, 
 
 Then becoming a section hand when he was grown, 
 
174 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Afterwards foreman of the gang, until he rose 
 
 To the superintendency of the railroad, 
 
 Living in Chicago, 
 
 Was a veritable slave driver. 
 
 Grinding the faces of labor, ■ 
 
 And a bitter enemy of democracy. 
 
 And I say to you, Spoon River, 
 
 And to you, republic. 
 
 Beware of the man who rises to power 
 
 From one suspender. 
 
 These are strange tales. So brutal that one won- 
 ders, if life in our little Western cities is as bad as this, 
 why everyone does not commit suicide. Crirne fol- 
 lows crime, and most of them of an extreme violence 
 and sordidness^ _ Some are crimes of ambition, many 
 of them are the terrible, meaningless crimes which 
 monotojay breeds, jmost of them are crimes of sex. 
 Mr. Masters is more preoccupied with sex than any 
 other English or American author has ever been<_ 
 and in a different way. I likened him to Strindberg 
 at the beginning of this chapter advisedly. Both 
 see life through the medium of sex, and sex for Jhe 
 most part cruel, untamed, perverted, tragic. The 
 English poet and novelist, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, is 
 also greatly preoccupied with sex, but in his work 
 there is a certain rapture, sex is treated as a burgeon- 
 ing of the mental and physical life, he throws over 
 it the transparent and glittering cloak of joy. But 
 the pages of Mr. Masters and August Strindberg. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 175 
 
 read like extracts from the Newgate Calendar. 
 Everything that is coarse and revolting in the 
 sexual life is here. J' Spoon River" is one long 
 chronicle of rapes, seductions, liaisons, and perver- 
 .sjons. It is the great blot upon Mr. Masters' 
 work. It is an obliquity of vision, a morbidness 
 of mind, which distorts an otherwise remarkable 
 picture. 
 
 The treatment of sex is one of the most insidious 
 dangers in the career of an artist ; a step one way, 
 and we have the colourless, lifeless work of so much 
 of the Victorian period ; a step the other, and the 
 poet is a nine days wonder, and is then rejected by a 
 sane world and relegated to the nefarious collections 
 of the erotically minded. How many excellent 
 books of a past age are neglected because of this 
 over-insistence upon se'x ! The plays of Congreve 
 would be as well known as those of Sheridan were 
 it not for this. It is slow suicide for an author to 
 commit this blunder. 
 
 Life is the material of art. But raw life is not 
 art ; to become art, it must be fused and transmuted. 
 yAlso, the professed realist^ are apt to forget that ^ 
 idealism, a perception of beauty, an aspiration after 
 fineness and nobleness, are also real./ Mankind 
 would have perished long ago, self-killed from despair, 
 if it had not been for these glimpses of the poetry of 
 existence. To make all such aspirations end in 
 disillusion and death is to have a twisted point of 
 
176 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 view. It cannot be denied even by Mr. Masters' 
 j nost con vinced admirers that, with all. his vitality 
 and courage, with all his wealth of experience and 
 vividness of presentation, his point of view is often 
 tolured^-and needlessly sensual and cruel. 
 
 Undoubtedly this element added to the immediate 
 notoriety of "Spoon River." But the book would not 
 be worth commenting upon, and Mr. Masters would 
 in no sense rank as the poet he does, if its sensuality 
 were not counteracted by other and great qualities. 
 
 Within certain limits, Mr. Masters has an f^x^ ^ 
 traordinary range of vision. Granted the limits, his 
 is a crowded canvas, and one teeming with lite. 
 He raises local politics to the realm of a world force. 
 The squabbles in the County Court House take on 
 an epic fire. Indeed, "Spoon River" might be 
 called an epic of everyday life. One feels that if Mr. 
 Masters had had the good fortune to be bom in a 
 great period, one momentous in its effect, the period 
 of the Civil War, let us say, or Europe at the present 
 time, or the Napoleonic Era, he would have known 
 how to give it due significance. 
 
 Perhaps our entrance into the Great War may 
 prove just the experience the poet needs. This 
 would certainly be the case were America nearer to 
 the firing line. It seems as though no living man 
 would be more keenly sensitive to the shock and 
 change which the war must inevitably bring upon 
 us. But it will be for later critics to record his 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 177 
 
 reactions to this upheaval. Writing at the beginning 
 of this period, we can only note what he has already 
 done, and it is his misfortune that he has lived at a 
 moment of pause, apparent pause, that is, when the 
 meanings of change are hidden. And, in that 
 moment, his part has been that of questioner — a 
 revolutionary, as I said before, a man who urges his 
 world on to change, but without any definite idea of 
 what such change is to bring about. What he sees is 
 that old shibboleths no longer hold, that an exclusive 
 Anglo-Saxon civilization does not fit our multi- 
 racial population. That our institutions and our 
 social fabric frequently jar upon our sensibilities, 
 that thought in America is in advance of custom, and 
 that personality being at variance with official life 
 results in a painful chafing. What he does not see 
 is that while he and his school are chiefly conscious 
 of the pain, forces are at work beneath the surface 
 which are already bearing the fruit of a new order. 
 That a more balanced and homogeneous life is even 
 now in process of formation. His attitude of mind 
 is the attitude of to-day, while other poets are already 
 concerned with the ideas of to-morrow. 
 
 One might illustrate by supposing a boy to re- 
 ceive the gift of a jacket. At first it is wholly com- 
 fortable and easy and a joy to its possessor, he takes 
 pleasure in its neat cut, and its delectable warmth. 
 But before long the stuf? shows signs of wear, it has 
 ceased to be a sure protection from the cold, his 
 
178 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 growth has made it somewhat too small. It catches 
 him when he stretches out his arm, it constricts his 
 chest when he tries to button it, he is constantly 
 aware of it because of a continual cramping. Once 
 he has divested himself of it, however, he is free 
 again, and as he goes about his business, he gives little 
 or no thought to the cast-off garment lying in a corner. 
 
 We cling to the old jackets because we have not 
 imagination enough to conceive that there may be 
 new ones. It is the poets, it always has been the 
 poets, who supply the imagination, and so gradually 
 bring about a new condition. 
 
 "Spoo n River^' undoub tedly errs on the side of 
 a too great preoccupation with crime and disease. 
 ■BtrrrTwouId be untair to its author not to remark 
 the occasional bursts of tenderness throughout the 
 book. One, " Emily Sparks," I have already quoted. 
 But there is another which is to me the most beauti- 
 ful and most tragic poem in the volume. This is 
 real tragedy, not the tragedy of sordid giving way to 
 inclination, but the tragedy of circumstance nobly 
 faced, the tragedy of success out pf failure, of joy 
 denied and yet abundantly received : 
 
 DOC HILL 
 
 I went up and down the streets 
 
 Here and there by day and night. 
 
 Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick. 
 
 Do you know why? 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 179 
 
 My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs. 
 
 And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them. 
 
 Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my 
 
 funeral, 
 And hear them murmur their love and sorrow. 
 But oh, dear God, my soul trembled : scarcely able 
 To hold to the railing of the new life 
 When I saw Em Stanton behind the oak tree 
 At the grave, 
 Hiding herself, and her grief ! 
 
 Technically, the poems in "Spoon River" show 
 Mr. Masters' work at its best; always excepting 
 "The Spooniad," which is hardly worth considering 
 from any point of view. The poems are in vers 
 libre, a form which I shall consider more carefully 
 in the next chapter, suffice it here to repeat the often 
 repeated characterization of it as "a verse-form 
 based upon cadence.l L Mr. Mastr r"' rhjrthmi tirr 
 not very subtle, liiilljjrj_iJ" 'liimiltn, tiiiil iiilly~tiT 
 them a certain elementaiyseric 
 
 SometimesjhgyidittSji^ er)'^ s lightly -from the rhythms 
 of prose, but they do differ. Here are some lines 
 taken at random : 
 
 They would have Ijmched me 
 
 Had I not been secretly hurried away 
 
 To the jail at Peoria. 
 
 And yet I was going peacefully home. 
 
 Carrying my jug, a little drunk, 
 
 When Logan, the marshal, halted me. 
 
l8o Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Now suppose these lines had been written : 
 
 They would have lynched me, 
 
 If I had not been hurried off before anyone knew 
 
 And lodged at once in the Peoria jail. 
 
 And yet I was going home quite peacefully 
 
 With my jug, possibly a httle bit drunk, 
 
 When I was held up by Logan, the marshal. 
 
 It can be seen, by comparing these two versions, 
 what excellent rhythm Mr. Masters' lines have. 
 
 Lyricism Is not the antagonist of realism. On the 
 contrary, it is the enforcer and brightener of it. 
 Mr. Frost points his realism with many lyric bursts. 
 Mr. Masters, on the contrary, is no lyrist. Con- 
 sidering his early love for the music of English verse, 
 it is strange to find how seldom he even attempts such 
 effects. Nor do we find many passages which, in a 
 few words, show us the beauty of nature. / Neither 
 the lyricism of sound lior vision are a part of Mr. 
 Masters' equipment./ What he excels in is direct 
 and forceful statement, which in his best passages 
 mounts to a certain grandeur. 
 
 I mentioned in the chapter on Edwin Arlington 
 Robinson that it had been stated that Mr. Masters 
 was indebted to Mr. Robinson for his idea of these 
 short sketches of men's lives. As a matter of fact, 
 I know it to be true that, at the time he wrote "Spoon 
 River," Mr. Masters had not read a line of Mr. 
 Robinson's poetry. It is only the most superficial 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg i8i 
 
 observer who could ever have supposed one to be 
 derived from the other. The whole scheme upon 
 which the two poets work is utterly different. Mr. 
 Robinso n^n3ly7:ps thp psyrhnlngy nf hia rhararters 
 to the minutest fra ction, he splits emotions and su b- 
 splits them. His people are interesting to him 
 - because of — Llieir thought-processes, or as psychic 
 reactions to environment. Indeed, the environ- 
 ment is frequently misty, except where it impinges 
 upon personality. Mr. Masters reveals the charac- 
 ter of his dramatis persona chiefly through their 
 actions. What they do is, of course, the outcome of 
 what they think, but it is usually the doing which 
 the poet has set down on paper. His people are 
 elementary and crude, carved on broad, fiat planes. 
 
 The Tilbury Town of Mr. Robinson's books 
 belongs more to the realm of mental phenomena 
 than to actual fact. It is a symbol of certain states 
 of mind. We feel it, but we do not see it. Spoon 
 River, on the other hand, is indubitably and geo- 
 grapfn'ralij^_a_pffirp. — - Wc know it cvou bett er than 
 we doTtsinhabitants. Just as a person is a whole to 
 us although made up of parts — eyes, ears, hands, 
 nose, hair, etc. — so Spoon River is a whole, although 
 constructed out of the life-histories of two hundred 
 and fourteen of its citizens. We can see the cemetery, 
 the Court House, the various churches, the shops, the 
 railroad station, almost with our physical eyes. 
 
 It is not only that Mr. Robinson and Mr. Masters 
 
1 82 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 employ a different method of approach, an absolutely 
 different technique; it is that fundamentally their 
 ideas, not only of art, but of life, differ. To one, fact 
 is the vague essence through which the soul of man 
 wanders ; to the other, man is a part, usually a tor- 
 tured part, of a huge, hard, unyielding substance, the 
 unalterable actuality of the world he inhabits. 
 
 If Mr. Masters has a prototype, that prototype 
 can best be found in some of the poems in the "Greek 
 Anthology." This one by Carphylides is in the very 
 spirit of some of the "Spoon River" poems. It, too, 
 is an epitaph, or a voice from the tomb : 
 
 traveller, listen as you pass by ; 
 Blame not my monument. 
 Even when dead I am 
 
 Worthy of lamentations. 
 
 1 have left children's children 
 And have enjoyed one wife 
 Of equal age with myself. 
 
 Three children have I held in my lap many times. 
 
 Nor have I had occasion to lament 
 
 The illness or death of one of them. 
 
 But they have poured out their libation in my honour 
 
 And met no harm 
 
 And have sent me on my way 
 
 To the land of the blessed 
 
 To sleep sweet sleep. 
 
 Another, by Meleager, recalls much of Mr. Mas- 
 ters' irony : 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 183 
 
 A gale blowing from the East, 
 Rough and calamity-bringing, 
 And night and the billows, 
 While Orion and the stars were invisible, 
 Have done me a hurt : 
 And I, KaUaischros, have sUpt out of life 
 While passing through the Lybian Sea 
 And tost about in the deep, have become food for the fishes. 
 _ But the tombstone here tells a lie. 
 
 That last line is extraordinarily like Mr. Masters. 
 Indeed, humanity varies very little throughout the 
 ages. It is just this which makes "Spoon River" 
 so remarkable — ij:s humanity . These are not ar- 
 tificial personages, these two hundred men and ' 
 women, /hey are real flesh and blood, with beating 'Z-' 
 hearts and throbbing brains, revealing themselves to 
 us with all their foibles and weaknesses, and their 
 occasional grandeur. .If, heaped one upon another, 
 this monument of mid-Western American life errs 
 on the side of over-sordidness, over-bitterness, over- 
 sensuality, taken each one for itself, we have a true 
 picture. It is never the individual characters whd 
 are false to type ; it is only in the aggregate that 
 the balance is lost by a too great preponderance of 
 one sort of person. 
 
 It has been insisted over and over again, since the 
 publication of "Spoon River," that here was the 
 great American poet, this verse was at last absolutely 
 of America, that not since Whitman had anything 
 
184 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 so national appeared in print. The importance of 
 "Spoon River" can hardly be overstated, and its 
 dominant Americanism is without doubt a prime 
 factor in that importance ; but, because Mr. Masters' 
 work is thoroughly local, is not to deny the same 
 quality to work of quite a different kind. Was Poe 
 less American than Whitman ? — is a question which 
 may very pertinently be asked here. Was Shake- 
 speare less English because he wrote "Hamlet"? 
 Was that arch-Englishman, Matthew Arnold, false 
 to his birthright because he published "Empedocles 
 on Etna" ? How foolish this point of'view is when 
 ^ so stated, is apparent at a glance. /Nationality is 
 so sublfle a thing that it permeates all a man says and 
 does./ He cannot escape it, no matter what subjects 
 stimulate his imagination. One would suppose that 
 the myths of Ancient Greece were (if any things are) 
 proof against the subtle transforming of national 
 temper, and yet look how they change in the hands 
 of Hawthorne. 
 
 Mr. Masters is a thoroughly American poet, but 
 not because he deals exclusively with American sub- 
 jects. Truth to tell, he does not, as we shall see 
 when, in a moment, we consider his later books. 
 N o. Mr.-Masters is American b e^a"gp he is of the 
 J ones. and_ _blood , rinrl Bp ir it nf Am^rfraT — His 
 tbou^vtJs-Ameriraa^^Jiis reac tions . a re-as-national 
 as our clear blue skies. 
 The poets of the New Movement are all intensely 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 185 
 
 national ; they are not, as I have already pointed 
 out, what the older generation were, followers of an 
 English tradition. They love their country, and 
 are proud of being her sons. But people differ in 
 their way of showing affection. Some men never 
 speak of it, although it is a constant influence ; 
 others shout it to the house-tops. When Mr. 
 Masters is intensely moved, he becomes blatant. 
 He keeps nothing to himself, out it comes on a swirl 
 of passion. So this Americanism of his is a very 
 obvious thing. It is a sort of leit-motif appearing 
 again and again, and preferably on the trumpets. 
 The symbol of this Americanfsm is the figure of 
 Lincoln. 
 
 Washington and Lincoln are the two great sym- 
 bols of American life. Bu^to deal adequately with 
 Washington needs a historical senseya knowledge of 
 the eighteenth century, which few of our poets yet 
 possess. (The only man I know who has given this 
 feeling for Washington at all, is a Frenchman, Henri 
 de R6gnier, and he has done it in prose.) It is 
 therefore to Lincoln that our poets turn as an em- 
 bodiment of the highest form of the typical Ameri- 
 can, the fine flower and culmination of our life as a 
 separate nation. 
 
 We have seen how a poet in the first stages of 
 this new movement dealt with Lincoln ; in the next 
 chapter, I shall show how a poet in the third 
 stage deals with him. In Mr. Robinson's poem, he 
 
1 86 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 -Hs^£ 
 
 „.^art symbol, part man, slightly conventionalized, 
 and a little remote and cold witha^ in Mr. Fletcher's 
 poem, he is raised almost to the rank of pure symbol, 
 as elusive and pervading as a brooding god ; with 
 Mr. Masters, Lincoln is a man first of all, but a man 
 who, in his actual life, typifies a national aspiration. 
 He is conceived as boldly, as surely, as any other of 
 Mr. Masters' characters, and although venerated 
 and loved with unchanging ardour, it is always as a 
 man, neither conventionalized by tradition, nor flung 
 by a powerful imagination into the realm of legend. 
 There is one little touch of Lincoln in "Spoon 
 River," a very beautiful touch, although only a 
 collateral one. It is the epitaph of Ann Rutledge, 
 the girl whom Lincoln loved, but who died before 
 they could be married. 
 
 ANN RUTLEDGE 
 
 Out of me unworthy and unknown 
 The vibrations of deathless music ; 
 "With malice toward none, with charity for all." 
 Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, 
 And the beneficent face of a nation 
 Shining with justice and truth. 
 I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, 
 Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, 
 Wedded to him, not through union. 
 But through separation. 
 Bloom for ever, O Republic, 
 From the dust of my bosom ! 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 187 
 
 Just one year after the publication of "The Spoon 
 River Anthology," appeared another book from Mr. 
 Masters' pen, a new volume of poems, "Songs and 
 Satires." 
 
 It has been hinted that many of the poems in this 
 volume are reprinted from those earlier books which 
 have slipt into oblivion. One would prefer to hope 
 so, for it seems inconceivable that the author of the 
 stark, vigorous "Spoon River" poems could after- 
 wards perpetrate such a banality as the following : 
 
 WHEN UNDER THE ICY EAVES 
 
 When under the icy eaves 
 
 The swallow heralds the sun, 
 And the dove for its lost mate grieves 
 
 And the young lambs play and run ; 
 When the sea is a plane of grass, 
 
 And the blustering winds are still, 
 And the strength of the thin snows pass 
 
 In the mists o'er the tawny hill — 
 The spirit of life awakes 
 
 In the fresh flags by the lakes. 
 
 That one stanza is an epitome of the magazine 
 verse of the 'eighties, and not very good magazine 
 verse at that. Here are all the old clicMs : doves 
 grieving for their lost mates, young lambs at play, 
 swallows who herald the sun, winds that bluster, 
 snows which pass over tawny hills, even the spirit of 
 life awaking by a lake bordered with flags. It would 
 
1 88 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 be difficult for one stanza to be a more complete illus- 
 tration of the old poetical jargon than that. It reads 
 like a parody; yet it is not intended as a parody, 
 but as a serious and beautiful lyric. It gives us 
 more than an insight into the reasons for Mr. Mas- 
 ters' early failures. 
 
 It would be unfair to the volume, however, to give 
 the impression that all the poems are as bad as this. 
 There are a number of weak lyrics scattered through 
 the book, however, which no admirer of Mr. Masters 
 can do other than deplore. And there are narrative 
 poems on such hackneyed subjects as "Helen of 
 Troy" and "Launcelot and Elaine," in which the 
 treatment does nothing to add freshness to the 
 themes. 
 
 This stanza from "Helen of Troy" will illustrate 
 what I mean : 
 
 We would behold fresh skies 
 Where summer never dies 
 And amaranths spring ; 
 Lands where the halcyon hours 
 Nest over scented bowers 
 On folded wing. 
 
 Or this other, from the "Ballad of Launcelot and 
 Elaine": 
 
 Then uprose brave Sir Launcelot 
 And there did mount his steed, 
 And hastened to a pleasant town 
 That stood in knightly need. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 189 
 
 There are ghastly attempts at an old English dic- 
 tion in this poem. We have "trees of spicery," 
 "morn's underne," "spake with a dreary steven." 
 
 That Mr. Masters should have written these poems 
 among his early four hundred is not strange, what is 
 strange is that he should have considered them worth 
 resurrecting after he had written "Spoon River." 
 
 yMr. Masters is seldom original when he writes in 
 regular forms/ It seems as though some obscure 
 instinct of relation set his mind echoing with old 
 tunes, old words, old pictures. Sometimes the result 
 is a parody of the verse of the past ; sometimes it is 
 only a copy, quite beautiful, were it only his own. 
 For instance, in "St. Francis and Lady Clare" : 
 
 Candles of wax she lit before 
 A pier glass standing from the floor ; 
 Up to the ceiling, off she tore 
 With eager hands her jewels, then 
 The silken vesture which she wore. 
 Her little breasts so round to see 
 Were budded like the peony. 
 Her arms were white as ivory, 
 And all her sunny hair lay free 
 As marigold or celandine. 
 
 What makes the book such a jumble is that these 
 ancient ditties are interspersed with perfectly modern 
 poems like "The Cocked Hat," "'So We Grew To- 
 gether,'" "All Life in a Life," and the underworld 
 studies: "Arabel," and "Jim and Arabel's Sister." 
 
190 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 But, in these modern poems, Mr. Masters has de- 
 serted the brevity of the "Spoon River" pieces, and 
 his doing so has lost him much and won him nothing. 
 When he allows himself a free hand, he does not 
 know when to stop. In '"So We Grew Together,' " 
 he takes nine pages where in "Spoon River" one 
 would have sufficed. "Arabel" is six pages in 
 length, "The Cocked Hat" is seven, and none of 
 these poems gains anything, either in vigour or 
 analysis, by the change. 
 
 "The Loop" is a descriptive sketch of the heart 
 of Chicago. But there is no quick flash of vision 
 here, no unforgettable picture imposed upon the mind 
 in a few words. Instead, the poem enumerates long 
 catalogues of objects, one after the other. They 
 have neither form, colour, nor relation. They are 
 not presented poetically, pictorially, not even musi- 
 cally (as the older verse counted music) , for the poem 
 is marred by such false rhymes as "current" and 
 "torrent." They are just lists, as dreary as an 
 advertisement from a department store. 
 
 THE LOOP 
 
 From State street bridge a snow-white glimpse of sea 
 Beyond the river walled in by red buildings, 
 O'ertopped by masts that take the sunset's gildings. 
 Roped to the wharf till spring shall set them free. 
 Great floes make known how swift the river's current. 
 Out of the north sky blows a cutting wind. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 191 
 
 Smoke from the stacks and engines in a torrent 
 Whirls downward, by the eddying breezes thinned. 
 Enskyed are sign boards advertising soap, 
 Tobacco, coal, transcontinental trains. 
 A tug is whistling, straining at a rope, 
 Fixed to a dredge with derricks, scoops and cranes. 
 Down in the loop the blue-gray air enshrouds, 
 As with a cyclops' cape, the man-made hills 
 And towers of granite where the city crowds. 
 Above the din a copper's whistle shrills. 
 There is a smell of coffee and of spices. 
 We near the market place of trade's devices. 
 Blue smoke from out a roasting room is pouring. 
 A rooster crows, geese cackle, men are bawling. 
 Whips crack, trucks creak, it is the place of storing, 
 And drawing out and loading up and hauling 
 Fruit, vegetables and fowls and steaks and hams, 
 Oysters and lobsters, fish and crabs and clams. 
 And near at hand are restaurants and bars, 
 Hotels with rooms at fifty cents a day. 
 Beer tunnels, pool rooms, places where cigars 
 And cigarettes their window signs display ; 
 Mixed in with letterings of printed tags. 
 Twine, boxes, cartels, sacks and leather bags, 
 Wigs, telescopes, eyeglasses, ladies' tresses. 
 Or those who manicure or fashion dresses. 
 Or sell us putters, tennis balls or brassies. 
 Make shoes, pull teeth, or fit the eye with glasses. 
 
 That is only the first section. The poem is seven 
 pages long ! 
 
192 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 There is one poem in the book which shows Mr. 
 Masters assuming a new rSle, or rather an old r61e 
 in a new manner. "In Michigan" has a lyric qual- 
 ity very unusual to the poet's work. Most of his 
 lyrics are couched in regular metres, and, for some 
 strange reason, Mr. Masters does not seem able to 
 think his own thoughts in conventional verse. Not 
 only his expressions, his very ideas, run merrily 
 back into the old moulds. On the other handj/Mr. 
 ~5 Masters' free verse poems are singularly devoid of 
 the lyricism of either sound or vision./ So much so, 
 indeed, that certain critic s-hav-e declared him to be a 
 neveKst ratherthan a poet. " In Michigan " proves 
 this verdict to be bii't partially true, for only a poet 
 could write such a passage as this : 
 
 I stole through echoless ways, 
 
 Where no twigs broke and where I heard 
 
 My heart beat Uke a watch under a pillow. 
 
 And the whippoorwiUs were singing. 
 
 And the sound of the surf below me 
 
 Was the sound of silver-poplar leaves 
 
 In a wind that makes no pause. . . . 
 
 I hurried down the steep ravine, 
 
 And a bat flew up at my feet from the brush 
 
 And crossed the moon. 
 
 To my left was the lighthouse. 
 
 And black and deep purples far away, 
 
 And all was still. 
 
 Till I stood breathless by the tent 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 193 
 
 And heard your whispered welcome, 
 And felt your kiss. 
 
 Lovers lay at mid-night 
 
 On roofs of Memphis and Athens 
 
 And looked at tropical stars 
 
 As large as golden beetles. 
 
 Nothing is new, save this. 
 
 And this is always new. 
 
 And there in your tent 
 
 With the bahn of the mid-night breeze 
 
 Sweeping over us, 
 
 We looked at one great star 
 
 Through a flap of your many-colored tent, 
 
 And the eternal quahty of rapture 
 
 And mystery and vision flowed through us. 
 
 If "The Loop" is without poetical images, "In 
 Michigan" shows that the^oet is r eally sensitive to 
 beauty, and at t imes po ssesses the_pgwgrjto_catch 
 " thatteauty in a phrase : 
 
 a quiet land 
 A lotus place of farms and meadows 
 
 gives the sleepy, lost quality of the landscape ex- 
 cellently well. Beautiful, too, is 
 
 on the hiU 
 From where we could see Old Mission 
 Amid blues and blacks, across scores of miles of the Bay, 
 Waving like watered silk under the moon ! 
 o 
 
194 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 He speaks of the "misty eyelids" of "drowsy 
 lamps," of a moon sinking "like a red bomb," of a 
 land-spit running out into the lake until 
 
 it seemed to dive under, 
 Or waste away in a sudden depth of water. 
 
 But even in this free-verse lyric, echoes of the older 
 poets haunt him, and not to his advantage : 
 
 a star that shows like a match which lights 
 To a blue intenseness amid the glow of a hearth 
 
 challenges a comparison, which proves Browning's 
 
 blue spurt of a lighted match 
 
 to be infinitely finer. 
 
 The haste with which Mr. Masters has followed 
 up the success of ''Spoon River" has undoubtedly 
 been his undoing. Temporary, let us hope, but for 
 the time, a fact. Eight months after the publication 
 of "Songs and Satires," his third book, "The Great 
 Valley, " made its appearance. 
 
 The Great Valley is of course that flat stretch of 
 continent between the Alleghany Mountains and 
 the Rockies. It is a paraphrase for what we com- 
 monly call the Middle West. In other words, these 
 are again poems of a locality. The book is a sort of 
 extended "Spoon River." The place is no more a 
 little provincial town, but Chicago and the country 
 adjacent. The horizon of place and character is 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 195 
 
 wider than "Spoon River," the poems are longer and 
 more detailed ; but, as in the long poems in "Songs 
 and Satires," the stretching out of his stories has 
 not worked to the poet's advantage. Had "Spoon 
 River" never been written, "The Great Valley" 
 would have been a remarkable book. Unfortu- 
 nately, it is still surpassed by the earlier volume. 
 One of the most interesting traits of "Spoon River" 
 was its homogeneity ; the volume was a whole, 
 as closely related within itself as is a novel, or 
 a/volume of essays grouped about a central theme. 
 
 have called "Songs and Satires" a jumble, Mr. 
 Masters' taste again fails him in "The Great 
 Valley." What have such classical subjects as 
 "Marsyas," "The Furies," "Apollo at Pherse," to 
 do with the shouting Americanism of the rest of 
 the book?/ 
 
 The truth is that in the back of the poet's heart, 
 he still longs for that atmosphere of poesy which 
 we have seen as the unappeased desire of his adoles- 
 cence. /These poems represent the nostalgia of C. 
 beauty. It eludes him still. He is th e poet of the 
 real, the absolute. He cannot break his bonds. 
 
 7 
 
 Co-ordination is an integral part of beauty; in art, 
 we call this co-ordination — taste, and of this par- 
 ticular kind of taste Mr. Masters has not a particle. 
 The classic poems are thrown pell-mell among the 
 others so carelessly that one wonders if Mr. Masters 
 really arranged the book at all. One of the most 
 
196 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 unpleasant of the author's modern sex-tragedies is 
 printed immediately after "Apollo at Pherae." 
 
 There is one new note in the volume, a sort of 
 tinkling sneer. As though a funeral march were 
 to be played on the glockenspiel. This kitchen lyric 
 is excellent in technique, but whether the sort of 
 thing is worthy of a man who could produce some 
 of the "Spoon River" poems is another question. 
 
 SLIP SHOE LOVEY 
 
 You're the cook's understudy 
 A gentle idiot body. 
 You are slender like a broom 
 Weaving up and down the room, 
 With your dirt hair in a twist 
 And your left eye in a mist. 
 Never thinkin', never hopin' 
 With your wet mouth open. 
 So bewildered and so busy 
 As you scrape the dirty kettles, 
 O Slip Shoe Lizzie 
 As you rattle with the pans. 
 There's a clatter of old metals, 
 O Slip Shoe Lovey, 
 As you clean the milk cans. 
 You're a greasy Uttle dovey, 
 A laughing scullery daughter 
 As you slop the dish water, 
 So abstracted and so dizzy, 
 O Slip Shoe Lizzie ! 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 197 
 
 So mussy, little hussie, 
 With the china that you break, 
 And the kitchen in a smear 
 When the bread is yet to bake, 
 And the market things are here — 
 O Slip Shoe Lovey I 
 
 You are hurrying and scurrying 
 From the sink to the oven. 
 So forgetful and so sloven. 
 You are bustling and hustling 
 From the pantry to the door, 
 With your shoe strings on the floor, 
 And your apron strings a-draggin', 
 And your spattered skirt a-saggin'. 
 
 You're an angel idiot lovey, 
 One forgives you all this clatter 
 Washing dishes, beating batter. 
 But there is another matter 
 As you dream above the sink : 
 You're in love pitter-patter, 
 With the butcher-boy I think. 
 And he'll get you, he has got you 
 If he hasn't got you yet. 
 
 For he means to make you his, 
 Shp Shoe Liz. 
 And your open mouth is wet 
 To a little boyish chatter. 
 You're an easy thing to flatter 
 
198 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 With your hank of hair a-twist, 
 And your left eye in a mist — 
 O Slip Shoe Lovey ! 
 
 So hurried and so flurried 
 And just a little worried 
 You lean about the room, 
 Like a mop, like a broom. 
 O Slip Shoe Lovey ! 
 O Slip Shoe Lovey ! 
 
 It is a relief to turn from a poem like that, clever 
 though it is, and a very authentic side of Mr, 
 Masters' talent, to the fine and serious "Autoch- 
 thon." Here Mr. Maisters compares the careers of 
 three famous men, all of whom were bom in the same 
 year : Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, and 
 Abraham Lincoln. Space forbids me to give the 
 whole poem, but I will quote two passages about 
 Lincoln, and the reader will remember what I said of 
 Mr. Masters' treatment of Lincoln a few pages back. 
 
 This is the year. 
 You sit in a little office there in Springfield, 
 Feet on the desk and brood. What are you thinking? 
 You're forty-one ; around you spears are whacking 
 The wind-miUs of the day, you watch and weigh. 
 The sun-light of your mind quivers about 
 The darkness every thinking soul must know. 
 And lights up hidden things behind the door. 
 And in dark comers. You have fathomed much, 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 199 
 
 Weighed life and men. O what a sphered brain, 
 Strong nerved, fresh blooded, firm in plasmic fire, 
 And ready for a task, if there be one ! 
 That is the question that makes brooding thought : 
 For you know well men come into the world 
 And find no task, and die, and are not known — 
 Great sphered brains gone into dust again. 
 Their light under a bushel all their days ! 
 
 And still in i860 all the Brahmins 
 
 Have fear to give you power. 
 
 You are a backwoodsman, a country lawyer 
 
 Unlettered in the diflScult art of states. 
 
 A denizen of a squalid western town. 
 
 Dowered with a knack of argument alone. 
 
 Which wakes the country school house, and may lift 
 
 Its devotees to Congress by good fortune. 
 
 But then at Cooper Union intuitive eyes 
 
 Had measured your tall frame, and careful speech, 
 
 Your strength and self-possession. Then they came 
 
 With that dramatic sense which is American 
 
 Into the hall with rails which you had split, 
 
 And called you Honest Abe, and wearing badges 
 
 With your face on them and the poor catch words 
 
 Of Honest Abe, as if you were a referee 
 
 Like Honest Kelly, when in truth no man 
 
 Had ever been your intimate, ever slapped you 
 
 With brisk familiarity, or called you 
 
 Anj^hing but Mr. Lincoln, never 
 
 Abe, or Abraham, and never used 
 
 The Hello Bill of salutation to you — 
 
200 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 O great patrician, therefore fit to be 
 Great democrat as well ! 
 
 Yes, Mr. Masters is the chief poet of our middle 
 era. Already, in the work of a man so closely allied 
 to him as Mr. Sandburg, we see evidence of a com- 
 ing change. Mr. Masters stands up rugged, solid, 
 energetic, clearing his way by stern force of will. 
 "IVIuch passes him by, there are notes in our national 
 life too high or too low for him to catch. /He cannot 
 always give back those he does catch. But what he 
 does give back is resonant with the overtones of 
 personality, with the truth of heart, body, and mind. 
 Whatever America is to become, "Spoon River" 
 will always stand in her libraries, a work of genius 
 and a record of what was. Already it vanishes, 
 even as it is being written down. Mr. Masters him- 
 self feels this, in "Come, Republic," he exhorts his 
 country to step forward boldly into the new time. 
 He sees it glimmering on the horizon, but too far 
 still for him quite to focus. Here we will leave 
 him, with the God-speed of his own words sounding 
 in our ears : 
 
 V 
 
 It is time to lift yourself, O Republic, 
 From the street comers of Spoon River. 
 
 To turn from Edgar Lee Masters to Carl Sandburg 
 is like crossing the line of a generation. In actual 
 years, they are not so far apart, but they represent 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 201 
 
 the two sides of the barrier of change. Mr. Sand- 
 burg, although intellectually and poetically in the 
 second stage of our "movement," belongs to the 
 new America which I have called multi-racial. He 
 springs from the strong immigrant class which comes 
 yearly in boat-loads to our shores. It is he and his 
 ilk who are moving us away from our Anglo-Saxon 
 inheritance. It is he and his ilk who bring us tiie 
 points of view which are working so surely, if insidi- 
 ously, upon the whole body of the people. 
 
 Some day, America will be a nation ; some day, 
 we shall have a national character. ATow, our 
 population is a crazy quilt of racial samples. /But 
 how strong is that Anglo-Saxon ground-work which 
 holds them all firmly together to its shape, if no 
 longer to its colour ! 
 
 Mr. Sandburg is of Swedish stock. The stock 
 which has given to the world Gustaf FrSding and 
 Selma LagerlOf . One has only to turn the pages 
 of "G5sta Berling" to see what manner of peasantry 
 Sweden has produced. One has only to read their 
 folk-tales to discover the poetry inherent in these 
 people, who can neither read nor write, but who can 
 watch the procession of the seasons fearlessly, snatch- 
 ing a beautiful joy through the short Summers, and 
 enduring the long dark Winters and their swirling 
 snows with quiet equanimity. 
 
 They are dumb for the most part, this peasantry, 
 but give them speech, give them letters, and what 
 
202 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 do they not become? In the particular instance 
 with which we have to do, they become the American 
 poet, Carl Sandburg. 
 
 Mr. Sandburg, no less than Mr. Masters, is at 
 war with himsdlf, and with the customs of the eco- 
 )\nomic world. /-His Swedish ancestors have given him 
 mysticism and poetry, his American experiences have 
 sown his heart thickly with a strange combination of 
 dissatisfaction and idealism. ' Many of his theories 
 are built upon false premises, but he has theories, 
 definite theories of reconstruction. And if he is 
 chiefly conscious of this reconstruction from the 
 financial side, his sub-conscious mind is at work upon 
 it also from the aesthetic side. 
 
 Mr. Sandburg possesses a powerful imagination, 
 which plays over and about his realistic themes and 
 constantly ennobles them. It is not only that 
 yellow primroses are more than primroses to him ; 
 strikes, and factories, and slaughter-houses, and 
 railroad trains, all take on a lyric quality under his 
 touch. It is the force of this imagination which 
 drags him on toward the third stage of our movement. 
 I say "drags him on,," because he never quite reaches 
 it. /He can never get free of the actual, can never 
 rise entirely above his world on the wings of a certain 
 hope. / 
 
 The first poem in his volume, "Chicago Poems," 
 will show what I mean. This is no mere bald pres- 
 entation of a city, but an imaginative conception 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 203 
 
 of real grandeur, and if the grandeur is spattered 
 with coarseness, perhaps that was inherent in the 
 theme — at the angle from which the poet chooses 
 to take it at any rate. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 Hog Butcher for the World, 
 
 Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, 
 
 Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler ; 
 
 Stormy, husky, brawling. 
 
 City of the Big Shoulders : 
 
 They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen 
 
 your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm 
 
 boys. 
 And they tell me you are crooked and I answer : Yes, it is true 
 
 I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. 
 And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is : On the faces of 
 
 women and children I have seen the marks of wanton 
 
 hunger. 
 And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer 
 
 at this my city, -and I give them back the sneer and say to 
 
 them: 
 Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so 
 
 proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. 
 Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here 
 
 is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities ; 
 Fierce as a dog -with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a 
 
 savage pitted against the wilderness. 
 Bareheaded, 
 Shoveling, 
 
204 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Wrecking, 
 Planning) 
 
 Building, breaking, rebuilding, 
 Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white 
 
 teeth, 
 Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man 
 
 laughs, 
 Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost 
 
 a battle, 
 Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and 
 under his ribs the heart of the people. 
 Laughing ! 
 Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half- 
 naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, 
 Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight 
 Handler to the Nation. 
 
 Carl Sandburg's father was a Swedish immigrant 
 whose real name was August Johnson. He came 
 to this country in search of work, and became a 
 construction hand on one of the great Western rail- 
 roads. He changed his name to Sandburg, because 
 there were so many other August Johnsons in the 
 gang with which he worked that confusion occurred, 
 and after the loss of one pay roll, he adopted this 
 simple method of avoiding such accidents in the 
 future. 
 
 August Johnson, or August Samdburg, was an 
 uneducated man. Uneducated as our school cur- 
 riculums count education, that is. He had been to 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 205 
 
 school for only three months in his life, his wife had 
 been to school for only two. He was obliged to 
 make "his mark," in the good old way, when append- 
 ing his name to contracts or other legal documents. 
 His son's career proves how arbitrary are our tests of 
 reading and writing to determine mental aptitude. 
 The results of education — character and intellectual 
 vigour — were surely present in this illiterate rail- 
 road worker, and these he has left a legacy to his son. 
 
 Carl Sandburg was bom at Galesburg, Illinois, 
 in 1878. In due time he was sent to school, but not 
 for long ; when he was thirteen he left to take a job 
 on a milk wagon. This avocation was abandoned 
 for the more exalted one of porter in a barber shop, 
 which in turn gave way to that of scene-shifter in a 
 theatre, to be followed by working a truck at a brick 
 kiln, and making balls in a pottery. 
 
 Nothing could have been better. The poet was 
 learning modem life through its constructive sources. 
 The pictures which all these trades have left in his 
 mind have greatly enriched his work. 
 
 When he was seventeen, Carl Sandburg went 
 West, for Illinois is East if we halve the continent. 
 Here he worked for a time at his father's old trade of 
 railroad construction, but left it to wash dishes in 
 hotels in Denver and Omaha, bursting out of doors 
 again to pitch wheat in Kansas. These were the 
 poet's wanderjdhre, a sort appropriate to a big indus- 
 trial democracy. 
 
2o6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 At the outbreak of the Spanish War, Carl Sand- 
 burg was learning the painter's trade in Galesburg. 
 The war appeared to his imagination as a means of 
 adventure in distant countries, places of mountains, 
 islands, and sea, with possible fighting to challenge 
 his heroism. He enlisted in Company C, Sixth 
 Illinois Volunteers — the first company, as it hap- 
 pened, to set foot on the Island of Porto Rico. 
 
 At the end of the war, the poet was mustered out, 
 with one hundred dollars in his pocket for the first 
 time in his life. Here was a chance. His eager mind 
 had been scantily fed hitherto. With his hundred 
 dollars, Mr. Sandburg put himself back to school. 
 The school was Lombard College, in his native town 
 of Galesburg. 
 
 At the close of his first college year, the officers cuid 
 men of his military company voted him a candidate 
 for cadetship at West Point. So to West Point the 
 young man went for his examinations. It is signifi- 
 cant that he got ninety-nine per cent in the physical 
 examination ; in his studies, he passed every thing 
 but arithmetic, which was a miserable failure, cUid 
 closed the door of the army definitely upon him. 
 This was probably a fortunate thing for his poeticcil 
 career. 
 
 On his return to Galesburg, his money was spent, 
 but his ambition was not. So he went back to 
 Lombard College, working his way through by 
 tutoring, ringing the college bell, and acting as janitor 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 207 
 
 of the gymnasium. His literary life began to assert 
 itself. He became the editor of the College monthly, 
 and editor and chief writer of an annual, "The 
 Cannibal " ; also, Galesburg boasted a local " Daily 
 Mail," and the young man obtained the position of 
 its college correspondent. 
 
 Galesburg was an enterprising and ambitious little 
 town in those days. A number of men who have 
 since made some mark in the larger world were active 
 in its affairs. There was a considerable amount of 
 intellectual fermentation constantly going on, and 
 to the young poet it meant the burgeoning of life : 
 moral, aesthetic, economic. It gave him a banner 
 under which to fight ; it released his own powers and 
 girded him for action. When Carl Sandburg left 
 college, he was no longer an unskilled labourer, work- 
 ing with his hands. He was a thinking man, with a 
 brain charged with ideas and emotions, determined 
 to do his part in bringing about the millennium. For 
 Carl Sandburg, too, is a revolutionary ; he must push 
 the world to where he is convinced it ought to be. 
 
 It is perhaps inevitable that a young man of sensi- 
 tive nature, born with a passionate love of humanity, 
 and seeing life only from the standpoint of the un- 
 skilled wage-earner, should find in our whole economic 
 civilization only a vast injustice. As I pointed out, 
 at the beginning of this chapter, the second stage of a 
 movement, the revolutionary one, must always con- 
 cern itself with material advance. As the outcome 
 
2o8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 of certain ideas, of course, but still, for immediate pur- 
 ppsesf^t is the alteration of those abuses in the realm 
 
 vof fact which chiefly concerns the propagandists. 
 
 ' It is probable that Mr. Sandburg felt very much 
 as he does now about matters sociological and eco- 
 nomic, before he went to Lombard College. But his 
 studies focussed his wandering sympathies. He left 
 college with a great, burning resolve to better social 
 conditions. It must be admitted that any one less 
 fitted than this generous, spirited young man to 
 
 j^cope with the economic paracloxes of high finance 
 
 I could hardly be imagined. /But ignorance is ever 
 foremost in the suggesting of panaceas./ Where Mr. 
 Masters' greater experience hesitated to suggest, Mr. 
 Sandburg was ready with a thousand cogent reasons. 
 The next step in his career was the obvious one for a 
 man of his tastes and training. , It was the newspaper, 
 that flamboyant medium for the dissemination of 
 half-baked ideas./ Surely, over the long-suffering 
 United States should float the banner of a huge front 
 page, crinkling its bold-faced headlines in the morn- 
 ing breeze. 
 
 So Mr. Sandburg roamed the West as a newspaper 
 man, salesman, and advertisement writer, and gradu- 
 ally his sociological yearnings took on a more practi- 
 cal turn. During 1907 and 1908, he worked as a 
 district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of 
 Wisconsin. We can imagine the young man, full of 
 ardour, persuasion, and personal charm, speaking at 
 
Edgar Lee Masters arid Carl Sandburg 209 
 
 street corners and factory gates, and, in the evenings, 
 writing pamphlets and leaflets to advance the cause. 
 It will help us to understand what manner of man 
 Mr. Sandburg is to glance for a moment at a little 
 pamphlet entitled "Incidentals," which was issued 
 by the Asgard Press, Galesburg, Illinois, some ten 
 years ago, or about 1907. This is a series of jottings, 
 such as might have been taken from a note-book. 
 They make no didactic claim, seeming rather to be 
 rules and thoughts for the author's own guidance. 
 They reveal a sweet and gentle nature, and also a 
 bold and strong one. This, called "Consolations," 
 is, if not new, at any rate indicative : 
 
 I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what 
 'Hike- right thing is. I am making mistakes and expect to make 
 more. Every day I know I have bungled and blundered and 
 come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years 
 pass on and I see the very world itself with its oceans and moun- 
 tains and plains as something unfinished, a peculiar little satis- 
 faction hunts out the comers of my heart. Sunsets and evening 
 shadows find me regretful at tasks undone, but sleep and the 
 dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes. 
 Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the 
 night-wind and I don't worry about my destiny. 
 
 In "Egoism," is the arrogance of youth, but of a 
 youth which harbours the seed of power : 
 
 I want the respect of intelligent men but I will choose for 
 myself the intelligent. I love art but I decide for myself what is 
 
-12 IG Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 art. I adore beauty but only my own soul shall teU me what 
 is beauty. I worship God but I define and describe God for 
 myself. I am an individual. The pleasure of my own heart 
 shall be first to inform me when I have done good work. 
 
 Already, lyricism is struggling for expression : 
 
 OUT OF DOORS 
 
 Freedom is found, if anywhere, in the great out-door world 
 of wild breezes and sunshine and sky. To get out into the day- 
 light and fill your lungs with pure air, to stop and watch a spear 
 of grass swaying in the wind, to give a smile daily at the wonder 
 and mystery of shifting light apd changing shadow, is to get 
 close to the source of power. MDut under the wide dome, amid 
 night odors and silences, you get your size, and breathe, feel, 
 think, and live. Careless winds blow in your face and your eye 
 is keen for things homely and beautiful near by. Stars look at 
 you through tangled tree tops. The rattle of a distant wagon is 
 like subdued laughter. You get a new hold on your own par- 
 ticular problems and the ghosts of despair are put out of 
 business. / 
 
 There is excellent good sense, too, in ' 'Whimsicalities" : 
 
 Sometimes when fate kicks us and we finally land and look 
 around, we find we have been kicked upstairs !/ 
 
 and pathetic fallacies such as the following: 
 
 If the working people knew the platitudes of politics as they 
 know the intricacies of base-ball, the kingdom of heaven would 
 fall through the sky and settle impalpably on the earth like a 
 vast air-ship. 
 
 i 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 211 
 but, in the " Prayer for Everyday," is a fine idealism : 
 
 O Thou great Spirit of Truth ! whose filaments pervade and 
 interfuse all things. Thou whose energy vibrates in passing 
 trolley car and far-swung planet, Thou art neither of the East 
 nor West nor North nor South. Thou art here and eversrwhere, 
 in all times and all places. 
 
 The hot-house rose belongs to Thee and the back-yard cabbage 
 is also Thine. From Thy hands came the blue-bottle flies that 
 buzz on the window pane and by Thy hands took shape sun, 
 moon, star, and worlds that throb and glow in measureless space. 
 Thou art in the pulsations of our brains and the desires of our 
 hearts. Across and through the whole scheme of things as they 
 are, Thy plan and law is at work. For the simple and common 
 things around us, like simlight and dew and rain and voices and 
 faces, we are thankful. < 
 
 To Thee belong all the children of men. Give them faith and 
 simplicity in their dealings with each other. Grant that they 
 look on each other as comrades, ready for laughter and love and 
 work and good-wiU and belief. Amen. 
 
 Already, in this leaflet, we see that Mr. Sandburg 
 has caught a fleeting glimpse of a road beyond the 
 stopping-place of materialism. He sees, but cannot 
 quite hit upon the path. It is his desire to get there, 
 to run happily along it followed by a great rejoicing 
 mob of "the people," but he can find no clearer line 
 of approach than through the brambles of economic 
 reform. He does not understand that what to him 
 is merely a means, is to most of his followers an end. 
 He has not grasped the fact that the world needs his 
 
 \ 
 
212 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 lyricism, his vision of beauty, far more than it needs 
 his concrete suggestions on material fact. He is a 
 poet who constantly flings away the guiding star 
 of a new order to grub a lump of coal. And yet Mr. 
 Sandburg professes to believe in the motive impulse 
 of ideas. He has said : 
 
 No man is more startling in action than a dreamer. Through 
 the centuries, the dramatic manoeuverings of dreamers have held 
 the world's eye and shaped its changing civilizations. All 
 creations of man, be they machines, statues, poems or political 
 movements, were at one time mere ideas, dreams and deep 
 longings, having no form outside the brains that conceived them. 
 To the restlessness and forever active recuperative powers of the 
 "seers of visions" is due the world's advance. 
 
 I Yet, again and again, he deserts the seer's mountain 
 ' peak for the demagogue's soap-box. 
 
 Mr. Sandburg has a vision, but it is vague, in- 
 |bhoate. " I am an idealist," he exclaims. "I don't 
 /know where I 'm going, but I'm on my way. ' ' This is 
 ' a joyous utterance, and Mr. Sandburg believes whole- 
 heartedly in joy.^It is just this belief in joy in the 
 midst of a joyless world that makes the paradox of 
 Mr. Sandburg's writings. He believes in it, but not 
 quite enough to confide in its complete saving power, 
 and he confuses himself with all mankind. "What 
 I ask for myself I want you to have on the same terms. 
 We are made of the same stuff. We are going the 
 same way." Again the fallacy of ardent youthf 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 213 
 
 It is only experience that teaches of how many vary- 
 ing stuffs mankind is made. "What is one man's 
 meat is another man's poison," is a truer statement. 
 Mr. Sandburg's desires no more mirror those of the 
 great body of the people, than did William Morris's 
 in an earlier generation. He has yet to discover 
 how different they are, and the discovery when made 
 may well be a shattering one. 
 He admits : 
 
 The great body of people is better off to-day than it ever was. 
 Books, music, pictures, travel, more people are enjoying these 
 things than ever before. The Roman patrician and the feudal 
 baron were lacking thousands of advantages to be had to-day for 
 peimies and dimes. 
 
 But farther on is this postulate : 
 
 Man does not live by bread alone. He has a soul. This soul 
 imperiously asks to be fed. It wants art, beauty, harmony. 
 For sweet sounds and forms of beauty and things that caress 
 the eye and thrill the touch, it asks and demands. 
 
 The people who are without these things are asking for them. 
 Those who have them in degree are asking for more. Patient as 
 the stars and unwearied as the earth, they know what they want. 
 Always and forever the cry has been for more and more and more. 
 Up from the huts and hovels and sordid bedraggled shanties 
 comes the cry for more. Let us feed our souls ! For Christ's 
 sake, let us feed our souls ! is the cry. 
 
 Is that really the great inarticulate cry of the 
 masses ? In face of facts, one may be permitted to 
 
214 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 doubt it ; and the worst side of the teaching of modem 
 sociology would seem to be its insistence upon ma- 
 terial rather than spiritual welfare. Certainly, our 
 newspapers, which exist by providing the public with 
 what it wants, hardly seem cognizant of such needs. 
 We may agree with Mr. Sandburg in the belief in a 
 better order, and yet feel sure that this better order 
 can best be arrived at through the saving medium 
 of ideas. 
 
 The man who makes beauty, constantly, energeti- 
 cally, undauntedly, stands more chance of moulding 
 opinion than he who dims that beauty by turning it 
 to uses for which it is unfitted. Mr. Sandburg is 
 like a man striving to batter down a jail with balls of 
 brightly coloured glass. He may well alter points of 
 view by focussing them upon his spheres of iridescent 
 light, but not by shooting these same spheres from a 
 cannon. 
 
 We need not follow him minutely through the many 
 changes of job of this period of his life. After various 
 occupations in various places, he became Secretary 
 to Mayor Seidel of Milwaukee, later joining the 
 staff of the "Milwaukee Journal" as Labour Editor. 
 
 A split with the Parliamentary Socialists was the 
 result of his promoting a street car strike. Since 
 which time he has been a free lance, allied to no 
 party, and passionately believing^in the dreams of 
 his own imagination, and in action — the action 
 prompted by these dreams ! 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 215 
 
 During the newspaper lockout and strike of 1912, 
 Mr. Sandburg went on the staflF of "The World." 
 Later, upon that paper going into the hands of a 
 receiver, he became its associate editor, on the 
 strength of some articles on Accident Prevention, 
 City Efficiency, and Municipal Accounting, which 
 had been printed in " LaFolIette's Weekly." In 
 January, 1914, he became a member of the staff of 
 "The Day Book," a courageous little sheet published 
 in Chicago, which has for its ideal the high resolve to 
 live without the aid of advertisements, and so pre- 
 serve its freedom from commercial control. 
 
 All this is fine, high-minded, pathetically honest. 
 But what has it to do with poetry ? Nothing. It is 
 as much the result of Fate as that a man should be 
 born in Iceland or Timbuctoo. But it is inevitable, 
 as is a man's nationality after he has once been born. 
 It is the result of circumstance, and of a book- 
 learning which has no earlier tradition than the 
 present possesses. 
 
 During this time, however, the natural poetry of 
 the man was gaining strength and expression. His 
 poem, "Chicago," was printed by "Poetry" early 
 in 1914, and, at the end of the year, was awarded the 
 Helen Haire Levinson prize of two hundred dollars 
 for " the best poem written by a citizen of the United 
 States during the year," which that magazine has in 
 its gift. 
 
 Whatever one may think of the advisability of 
 
2i6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 prizes^ however one may balk at any one poem being 
 so confidently labelled " the best," no one could fail to 
 see on reading ""Ci?^':ago" that here was a poet with 
 a vigorous personality and an original technique. 
 
 Mr. Sandburg continued to contribute poems to 
 various periodicals for the next two years, principally 
 to "Poetry," "The Masses," and "Others," and in 
 April, 191 6, his collected poems were issued by 
 Messrs. Henry Holt and Company, under the rather 
 forbidding title of "Chicago Poems." 
 ' The impression which one gets on reading this 
 book is of a heavy steel-gray sky rent open here and 
 there, and, through the rents, shining pools of clear, 
 pale blue. It is a rare and beautiful combination 
 which we find in this volume, under whatsoever 
 simile we describe itj Seldom does such virility go 
 with such tenderness. There is no bitterness here 
 such as we find in "Spoon River"; there is anger, 
 there js^-imj-uat prejudice, but the soul of the poet 
 is wholesome and sane. The reader feels a certain 
 wistfulness coming over him as he looks at so much 
 strength and hope pitting itself against a cruel nat- 
 ural law. Perhaps science was not one of the sub- 
 jects in Mr. Sandburg's course at Lombard College, 
 for, to him, all cru^elty is man-made, he has but to 
 sweep away the man who made it, and behold, it is 
 gone, all study of the lives of wild animals and fishes 
 notwithstanding. If only life were as simple as that ! 
 If only one's morality could be measured by one's 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 217 
 
 pocket-book ! A man in a well-cut coat — he is an 
 evil thing, shun him ; a man in rags begging on a 
 street corner — take him to your heart, he is of the 
 elect. It is but just to say that Mr. Sandburg 
 tries to be fair to his millionaires (all his well-to-do 
 men are millionaires), in fact, a great desire for jus- 
 tice is visible throughout the book ; but prejudice is 
 a firmly-rooted thing, and try as he will, Mr. Sandburg 
 cannot help feeling that virtue resides^ith^the peo- 
 ple who earn their daily bread with their hands 
 rather than with those who do so with their brains. 
 Doubtless, Mr. Sandburg considers that the brain-, 
 workers get more than they need, and the hand- 
 workers less. Perhaps this is true, of certain sorts 
 of brain-work, that is. (For it is not true of poets, 
 scientists, nor of any of the higher kinds of brain- 
 workers.) But this form of doctrinie leads to a 
 strange reversion of values. Through pity and 
 sympathy, the poet is led to a re-valuation of human 
 types, in which those least far on the evolutionary 
 road, those least important if we measure by scien- 
 tific laws, come in for the most attention. 
 
 I point this out, not with any desire to belittle., 
 the great value of studies of these types, but to 
 mark how invariably a preoccupation tends to blur 
 a man's eyes to the fundamental principle of all 
 human existence, which is advance, evolution. No 
 one will deny that the brutal, unimaginative dinner- 
 eating millionaire is probably one of the lowest forms 
 
2i8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 of animals on our earth. But there is another type, 
 the high-minded, ideal-following, sober-living man, 
 who needs to be considered. He rather spoils the 
 argument, so he is usually left out of it, which is 
 scarcely fair. Not that Mr. Sandburg, or other 
 democratic poets, deny his existence, but they throw 
 the weight of their sympathy and their art into the 
 scale against him. Whether constant preoccupa- 
 tion with disease is a healthy form of literature, 
 whether it acts as a curative, is open to question. 
 But we can surely say that to be curative the disease 
 must be treated unsentimentally and truly. Mr. 
 Sandburg has aimed at doing this, has striven hard 
 to do it. For this, one honours him above his fellows. 
 For this, and the spirit of beauty which pervades his 
 work. 
 
 To illustrate: "Fellow Citizens" is a fine poem, 
 true, and with well-balanced values : 
 
 FELLOW CITIZENS 
 
 I drank musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with the million- 
 aire manufacturer of Green River butter one night 
 
 And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker, he 
 spoke of a beautiful daughter, and I knew he had a peace 
 and a happiness up his sleeve somewhere. 
 
 Then I heard Jim Kirch make a speech to the Advertising Asso- 
 ciation on the trade resources of South America. 
 
 And the way he lighted a three-for-a-nickel stogie and cocked it 
 at an angle regardless of the manners of our best people. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 219 
 
 I knew he had a clutch on a real happiness even though some of 
 
 the reporters on his newspaper say he is the living double of 
 
 Jack London's Sea Wolf. 
 In the mayor's office the mayor himself told me he was happy 
 
 though it is a hard job to satisfy all the office-seekers and 
 
 eat all the dinners he is asked to eat. 
 Down in Gilpin Place, near Hull House, was a man with his jaw 
 
 wrapped for a bad toothache. 
 And he had it all over the butter millionaire, Jim Kirch, and the 
 
 mayor when it came to happiness. 
 He is a maker of accordions and guitars and not only makes 
 
 them from start to finish, but plays them after he makes 
 
 them. 
 And he had a guitar of mahogany with a walnut bottom he offered 
 
 for seven dollars and a half if I wanted it. 
 And another just Uke it, only smaller, for six dollars, though he 
 
 never mentioned the price till I asked him, 
 And he stated the price in a sorry way, as though the music 
 
 and the make of an instrument count for a million times more 
 
 than the price in money. 
 I thought he had a real soul and knew a lot about God. 
 There was light in his eyes of one who has conquered sorrow in so 
 
 far as sorrow is conquerable or worth conquering. 
 Anyway he is the only Chicago citizen I was jealous of that 
 
 day. 
 He played a dance they play in some parts of Italy when the 
 
 harvest of grapes is over and the wine presses are ready for 
 
 work. 
 
 But, in "Dynamiter," the values are woefully out 
 of line : 
 
220 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 DYNAMITER 
 
 I sat with a dynamiter at supper in a German saloon eating 
 
 steak and onions. 
 And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children and the 
 
 cause of labor and the working class. 
 It was laughter of an unshakable man knowing life to be a rich 
 
 and red-blooded thing. 
 Yes, his laugh rang Hke the call of gray birds filled with a glory 
 
 of joy ramming their winged flight through a rain storm. 
 His name was in many newspapers as an enemy of the nation 
 
 and few keepers of churches or schools would open their 
 
 doors to him. 
 Over the steak and onions not a word was said of his deep days 
 
 and nights as a dynamiter. 
 Only I always remember him as a lover of life, a lover of children, 
 
 a lover of all free, reckless laughter everywhere — lover of 
 
 red hearts and red blood the world over. 
 
 That a man loves children, particularly his own, 
 is a good and beautiful thing. But to use that fact 
 as a dazzling screen to obscure the horror of his trade 
 of blo wing other men, who possibly also love their 
 T!Rrrdreh, into atoms, because of a difference in opin- 
 ions, may fairly be stated as faulty vision on the part 
 of the poet. Now Mr. Sandburg severely handles 
 the killing in war ; a killing again brought about by 
 a difference of opinions. He does not justify his 
 dynamiter, it is true, but he looks at him obliquely, 
 leaving out what he does not wish to see, because of 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 221 
 
 his sympathy with the opinions the man represents. 
 
 yPropaganda is the pitfall of poetSy/So excellently 
 endowed a poet as Mr. Sandburg should beware. 
 
 Far better, because real and pitiful, are "A 
 Teamster's Farewell," "Fish Crier," "Onion Days," 
 ' ' Mamie, ' ' and a host of other poems. But the prop- 
 
 ^:^aggd^;,„seizes him again in "The Right to Grief." 
 What justification can so honest a poet find for 
 sneering at a father's grief over his dead child and 
 calling it "perfumed sorrow"? Is not grief stark 
 and terrible in all its forms, whether it come to rich 
 or poor ? The reformers hurt their cause by showing 
 such a lack of knowledge of human nature. But 
 again, Mr. Sandburg wins our sympathy in "Child 
 of_tb,R RomaQgJl_ 
 
 I have dwelt so long on^the propagandist side of 
 Mr. Sandburg's book, because he challenges us with 
 it upon many pages. But these are poems, and it is 
 as poetry that the work must be judged. "Chicago 
 Poems" is one of the most original books which this 
 age has produced. Mr. Sandburg, in a piece en- 
 titled "Style," explains that his style, good or 
 bad, is his own. It is just this fact which is so 
 interesting. Whether the poems are in regular Eng- 
 lish or in the slang of the streets, they are full 
 of personality. Written, some in vers litre, some 
 in a rhythmical prose, some in a cross between the 
 two, they seldom fail to justify their form to the 
 ear. If any one will take the trouble to read the 
 
222 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 first poem, "Chicago," which I quoted abo\ 
 aloud, he will find how^strangely and musical 
 it beats out its heavy cadences. Then take tl 
 beautiful little ^sketch, "Fog": 
 
 / 
 
 FOG 
 
 The fog comes 
 On little cat feet. 
 It sits looking 
 over harbor and city 
 on silent haunches 
 and then moves on. 
 
 That whispers along as stealthily as the fog itse 
 It is one of the best of the nature pieces, but there a 
 many others scattered through the book. For IVl 
 Sandburg is a true poet, observant of beauty, ai 
 qaick with new trains of thought^ in which to e 
 press it. 
 
 This, with its lovely last line, for instance : 
 
 NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD 
 
 Stuff of the moon 
 Rims on the lapping sand 
 Out to the longest shadows. 
 Under the curving willows, 
 And round the creep of the wave line, 
 Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters 
 Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the nig 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 223 
 
 Often, in his short lyrics, we see Mr. Sandburg 
 approaching the Imagist technique : 
 
 WINDOW 
 
 Night from a railroad car window 
 Is a great, dark, soft thing 
 Broken across with slashed of light. 
 
 I have said several times that he is the link leading 
 over from the second stage into the third. The poem 
 I have just given will prove how absolutely this is so, 
 and, in the next chapter, the gap will be found to have 
 been bridged by just these poems. 
 
 He has a curiously wide-flying imagination. In 
 "Hydrangeas," the suggestion is so subtle that we 
 feel the poet's meaning rather than see it. Yet is 
 this not a war-poem hidden under a figure: true, 
 tragic, stem ? 
 
 HYDRANGEAS 
 
 Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas turn rust and go soon. 
 Already mid September a line of brown runs over them. 
 One sunset after another tracks the faces, the petals. 
 Waiting, they look over the fence for what way they go. 
 
 That poem is not in the section of the book called 
 "War Poems." It is as well. Perhaps it is not of 
 this war, but of any war, all war — Life. 
 No poet of to-day has touched the present war 
 
224 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 more convincingly, more poetically, than Mr. Sand- 
 Lurg. "Killers" is a terriBle thing : 
 
 KILLERS 
 
 I am singing to you 
 ; ju 't as a man with a dead child speaks ; 
 '.-Tard as a man in handcuffs, 
 I fdd where he cannot move : 
 
 Under the sun 
 f \ J sixteen million men, 
 '^ osen for shining teeth, 
 cih.irp eyes, hard legs, 
 Aj i a running of young warm blood in their wrists. 
 
 And a red juice runs on the green grass ; 
 'da red juice soais the dark soil. 
 An i the sixteen million are killing . . . and killing and killing. 
 
 T never forget them day or night : 
 I'hfcy beat on my head for memory of them ; 
 Th..y pound on my heart and I cry back to them, 
 "^o their homes and women, dreams and games. 
 
 I wake in the night and smell the trenches, 
 Ar.'^. hear the low stir of sleepers in lines — 
 ^"i .teen million sleepers and pickets in the dark : 
 ^oome of them long sleepers for always, 
 Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for alwa}^, 
 ?i: ^d in the drag of the world's heartbreak, 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 225 
 
 Eating and drinking, toiling . . . on a long job of killing. 
 Sixteen million men. 
 
 In a flash, the poet sets this war apart from former 
 wars. He does not say so, he raises a picture, a 
 dream of fancy, and it is all in that slight, short 
 dream : 
 
 STATISTICS 
 
 Napoleon shifted, 
 
 Restless' in the old sarcophagus 
 
 And murmured to a watchguard : 
 "Who goes there?" 
 " Twenty-one million men. 
 
 Soldiers, armies, guns. 
 
 Twenty-one million 
 
 Afoot, horseback. 
 
 In the air. 
 
 Under the sea." 
 
 And Napoleon turned to his sleep : 
 "It is not my world answering ; ■ 
 
 It is some dreamer who knows not 
 
 The world I marched in 
 
 From Calais to Moscow." 
 
 And he slept on 
 
 In the old sarcophagus 
 
 While the aeroplanes 
 
 Droned their motors 
 
 Between Napoleon's mausoleum 
 
 And the cool night stars. 
 
226 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 I We notice in these poems an entirely different 
 j! technique from that employed by Mr. Robinson and 
 Mr. Frost. Their content, their points of view, were 
 modern ; their form was notv In Mr. Masters' 
 work, a new style of presentation made its appear- 
 ance, but the very matter of form seemed to exact 
 certain sacrifices. The "Spoon River" pieces were 
 mostly bald presentation of fact. When Mr. Mas- 
 ters essayed the lyrical, he usually felt constrained 
 to return to metrical verse. A stuHent considering 
 Mr. Masters' practice, might very well be led into 
 supposing that the new forms were essentially non- 
 lyrical. But here, in the work of Mr. Sandburg, we 
 find such a hypothesis to be untenable. These 
 poems which I have quoted show the new forms to 
 be as proper a medium for Ijaical emotion as is 
 metrical verse. I shall only note this here, for, in 
 the matter of form, Mr. Sandburg has been sur- 
 passed by the poets in the third stage of the New 
 Movement. In the next chapter, I shall consider at 
 length this vexed and interesting question. 
 
 All the poets of the New Movement seem haunted 
 by the visions of history. It is commonly supposed 
 that they cut themselves off from the past. Far 
 from it; they are more concerned with analogies 
 between past and present than is often the case in 
 poetry. History, to them, is no dry and mouldy 
 document, but both a live and palpitating reality and 
 a legendary touchstone. I have spoken of the treat- 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 227 
 
 ment of Lincoln by Mr. Robinson, Mr. Masters, and 
 Mr. Fletcher. A moment ago, in "Statistics," we 
 found Mr. Sandburg occupying himself with Napo- 
 leon. In that poem. Napoleon was fact, legend, and 
 symbol ; he was many things, but never a dead frag- 
 ment of a dead world. In "Cool Tombs," Mr. Sand- 
 burg again has recourse to history. It is by this 
 analogy with the past that he lights the present. 
 Th e poem is in Mr. Sandb urgls-moat personal idiom. 
 Serious, beautifiiLlines alternating with.,the slang of 
 the day, and all to bring about a grave and moving 
 whole, 
 
 COOL TOMBS 
 
 When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot 
 the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool 
 tombs. 
 
 And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, 
 cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool 
 toflibs. 
 
 Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in 
 November or a paw-paw in May, did she wonder ? does she 
 remember ? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs ? 
 
 Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheer- 
 ing a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . 
 tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more 
 than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs. 
 
228 ■ Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Not the least of Mr. Sandburg's attributes is 
 irony, a sad, pitying irony : 
 
 LIMITED 
 
 I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the 
 
 nation. 
 Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen 
 
 aU-steel coaches holdiag a thousand people. 
 (All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and 
 
 women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to 
 
 ashes.) 
 I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers : 
 
 "Omaha." 
 
 That poem seems to me little short of magnificent. 
 Again, take "Buttons," from the section, "War 
 Poems": 
 
 BUTTONS 
 
 I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising 
 
 in front of the newspaper office. 
 Buttons — red and yellow buttons — blue and black buttons 
 
 — are shoved back and forth across the map. 
 A laughing young man, stmny with freckles, 
 Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd, 
 And then fixes a yellow button one inch west 
 And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west. 
 (Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak 
 
 along a river edge. 
 Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in 
 
 their throats.) 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 229 
 
 Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on 
 the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the 
 freckled-face young man is laughing to us ? 
 
 All these war poems, are very strong. 
 
 There is ofie" unfortunate slip throughout the 
 volume. And it is one which Mr. Sandburg shares 
 with Mr. Masters and with many other modem 
 American writers. It is an occasional slip in gram- 
 mar. The constant use of ' ' will " for " shall, ' ' and of 
 " would " for " should," is a torment to the instructed 
 ear ; and the common American blunder of employ- 
 ing " around " quite apart from its true meaning of 
 "surrounding," confusing it for "round" — about, 
 hither and thither, etc. — is a constant annoyance in 
 both these authors. 
 
 Of course, language must change ; words must be 
 added as life grows more complex and inventions 
 increase. But to impoverish a language by forcing 
 shades of meaning to become confused, is another 
 matter. The picturesque quality of American slang 
 shows us to be an imaginative people ; but, on the 
 oEKef hand, this blurring of fine shades of expression 
 proves that we have some distance to go before we 
 cah'Be considered a literary people. It is perhaps 
 inevitable, although to be regretted, that current 
 speech should exhibit an occasional incorrectness, but 
 it is strange that an author should permit faults 
 of grammar to appear in his printed work. The 
 only answer is — he does not notice them. This is. 
 
230 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 of course, unfortunate; but it is a matter which 
 time and cultivation will eradicate. We find few 
 such mistakes in the work of those poets in the first 
 stage of the modern movement, who inherit the 
 traditions of an older practice ; or in the work of the 
 poets of the third stage, who have progressed far 
 enough along the road of evolution to have again 
 achieved a culture, at once cosmopolitan and indubi- 
 tably their own. 
 
 Perhaps nothing better illustrates the stages of a 
 movement than this fact of language ; and it is per- 
 fectly understandable that at a time when life, art, 
 is in a state of flux, those poets most conscious of 
 changing conditions should be swept along on the 
 waves of thought so fast that they have neither time 
 nor inclination to concern themselves with correct- 
 ness of expression. Of course, it may be objected 
 that this is largely a matter of education, but, in a 
 young country such as America is, nationality must 
 go through the stage of lack of education in its effort 
 to cast aside the leading strings of tutelage. It is 
 only later that it emerges, purged and whole. 
 
 " Chicago Poems" is divided into sections of which 
 perhaps "Handfuls" is the least impressive, but 
 seldom does a first book contain so few unsuccessful 
 things. 
 
 It will have been observed throughout these poems 
 how the poet's imagination constantly colours and 
 brightens the subject he has In hand. The last line 
 
Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 231 
 
 his little piece is a good illustration of what I 
 Id point out : 
 
 A FENCE 
 
 the stone house on the lake front is finished and the work- 
 men are beginning the fence. 
 
 palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can 
 stab the life out of any man who falls on them, 
 fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all 
 vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children look- 
 ng for a place to play. 
 
 ng through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing 
 ;xcept Death and the Rain and To-morrow. 
 
 hiere is something of Hans Christian Andersen in 
 poem. A touch of the Scandinavian mysticism ^ 
 :h Mr. Sandburg comes by through right of 
 ritance./ 
 
 idged from the standard of pure art, it is a 
 that so much of Mr. Sandburg's work con- 
 s itself with Entirely ephemeral phenomena./ 
 problems of posterity will be other than those 
 :h claim our attention. Art, nature, humanity, 
 eternal. /But the minimum wage will probably 
 ter as little to the twenty-second century as 
 id to the thirteenth, although for different 
 3ns. 
 
 r. Sandburgs- has not the .broad outlook to 
 eve the epic.quality of Mr.,Masters' work. He is 
 ric poet,,but the lyrist in him has a hard time to 
 
232 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 make itself heard above the brawling of the market- 
 place. ~ 
 
 It is dangerous to give a final verdict on contem- 
 porary art. All that one can safely say of Mr. 
 Sandburg's work is that, it contains touches of great 
 and original beauty, and whatever posterity may feel 
 about it taken merely as poetry, it cannot fail to 
 hold its place to students of this period as a necessary 
 link in an endless chain. 
 
THE IMAGISTS: 
 "H.D." AND JOHN GOULD FLETCHER 
 
THE IMAGISTS: 
 H.D." AND JOHN GOULD FLETCHER 
 
 We are now to deal with the work of the small 
 group of poets known as Imagists. Later, I shall 
 explain just what are the tenets of the Imagist School, 
 but before beginning on the work of the two poets 
 whose names stand at the head of this chapter, it is 
 proper to state that they only represent a fraction of 
 the Imagist group. Of course, any one who writes 
 poetry from the same point of view might be said to 
 write Imagistic verse, to be an Imagist, in short; 
 but, in speaking of the Imagists as a group, I shall 
 confine myself to those six poets whose work has 
 appeared in the successive volumes of the annual 
 anthology, "Some Imagist Poets." These poets are 
 exactly divided in nationality, three being American, 
 three English. The English members of the Imagist 
 group are Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, and D. H. 
 Lawrence, and I regret that this book, being confined 
 to American poets, leaves me no opportunity to dis- 
 
 235 
 
236 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 cuss the work of these Englishmen. The three 
 American Imagists are the lady who writes under 
 the pseudonym of " H. D.," John Gould Fletcher, and 
 myself. In this chapter, therefore, I shall consider 
 only the work of "H. D." and John Gould Fletcher. 
 
 However individual the work of- the six Jjnagist. 
 poets is (and any one who has read their anthology 
 cannot fail to have observed it), the poems of 
 "H. D." and Mr. Fletcher are enough in themselves 
 to show the tendencies and aims of the group. 
 
 I, suppose_.few-Jiterary .moverneiits-bave' been so 
 little understood as Imagism. Only a short time 
 ago, in the "Yale Review," Professor John Erskine 
 confessed that he had no clear idea of what was 
 Imagist verse and what was not, and in unconscious 
 proof of his ignorance, spoke of Robert Frost and 
 Edgar Lee Masters as Imagists. 
 
 To call a certain kind of writing "a school," 
 and give it a name, is merely a convenient method of 
 designating it when we wish to speak of it. We 
 have adopted the same method in regard to distin- 
 guishing persons. We say John Smith and James 
 Brown, because it is simpler than to say : six feet 
 tall, blue eyes, straight nose — or the reverse of 
 these attributes. Imagist verse is verse which is 
 written in conformity with certain tenetsvgluntarily 
 adopted by the poets as being those by which they 
 consider the best poetry to be produced. They may 
 be right or they may be wrong, but this is their belief. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 237 
 
 Imagism, then, is a particular school, springing up 
 within a larger, more comprehensive movement, 
 the New Movement with which this whole book 
 has had to do. This movement has as yet received 
 no convenient designation. We, who are of it, natu- 
 rally have not the proper perspective to see it in all 
 its historic significance. But we can safely claim it 
 to be a "renaissance," a re-birth of the spirit of truth 
 and beauty^ IFlmeans a re-discovery of beauty in 
 ourjnodEmjworld, and the originality and honesty 
 to afiirm that beauty in whatever manner is native 
 ,to the poet. 
 
 I have shown Edwin Arlington^ Robinson and 
 Robert Frost as the pioneers of this renaissance ; I 
 have shown Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg 
 plunging forward in quest of change and freedom, 
 hurling themselves against the barshness and mate- 
 rialism of existing conditions, touting their beliefs, < 
 sometimes raucously, but always honestly and with 
 abounding courage. /Now, I am to show a condition, 
 not changing, but changed. These poets not only 
 express themselves differently, they see life and the 
 universe from a different standpoint. 
 
 It is not over ; the movement is yet in its infancy. 
 Other poets will come and, perchance, perfect where 
 these men have given the tools. Other writers, 
 forgetting the stormy times in which this movement 
 had its birth, will inherit in plenitude and calm that 
 for which they have fought. Then our native flowers 
 
238 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 will bloom into a great garden, to be again conven- 
 tionalized to a pleasance of stone statues and 
 mathematical parterres awaiting a new change which 
 shall displace it. This is the perpetually recurring 
 history of literature, and of the world. 
 
 I have chosen the Imagists as representing_the_thKd 
 stage of the present movement, advisedly, for only 
 in them do I see that complete alteration of point of 
 view necessary to this third stage. An alteration, 
 let me add, due solely to the beliefs — moral, reli- 
 gious, and artistic — inherent in the characters of 
 these poets. Honest difference of opinion leads to 
 honestly different work, and this must not be con- 
 fused with the absurd outpourings of those gadflies 
 of the arts who imitate the manners of others without 
 an inkling of their souls; nor with those nefarious 
 persons who endeavour to keep themselves be- 
 fore the public by means of a more or less clever 
 charlatanism. 
 
 The spoken word, even the written word, is often 
 misunderstood. I do not wish to be construed as 
 stating that poets in the third stage are better, as 
 poets, than those in the other two. /'iFundamental 
 beliefs change art, but do not, necesscirily, either 
 improve or injure it. / Great poetry has been written 
 at every stage of the world's history, but Homer 
 did not write like Dante, nor Dante like Shakespeare, 
 nor Shakespeare like Edgar Allan Poe. So, in 
 literary criticism, one may assign a poet his place 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 239 
 
 in a general movement without any attempt to 
 appraise his individual merit by so doing. 
 
 Before taking up the work of "H.D." and John 
 Gould Fletcher in detail, I think it would be well to 
 consider, for a moment, what Imagism is, and for 
 what those poets who style themselves "Imagists" 
 stand. 
 
 [ In the preface to the anthology, "Some Imagist 
 ' Poets," there is set down a brief list of tenets to which 
 the poets contributing to it mutually agreed. I do 
 not mean that they pledged themselves as to a creed. 
 I mean that they all found themselves in accord 
 upon these simple rules. 
 
 I propose to take up these rules presently, one 
 by one, and explain them in detail, but I will first 
 set them down in order : 
 
 1. To use the language of coiimion speech, but to emElcy 
 always the exact_woid, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely 
 decorative word. . 
 
 2. To create new rhjrthms — as the expression pi_ new 
 moods — and not to copy old rhjrthms, which merely echo old 
 moods. We do not insist upon "free-verse" as the only method 
 of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. 
 We believe that the jndividuality of a poet may often be better 
 expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry 
 a new cadence means a new idea. 
 
 3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It 
 is not good art to write badly of aeroplanes and Automobiles, 
 nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We 
 
240 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 believe passionately ia the artistic value of modem life, but we 
 wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so 
 old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 191 1. 
 
 4. T o present an iiBage, (hence the name: "Imagist"). 
 We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry 
 should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generali- 
 ties, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason 
 that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the 
 real difficulties of his art. 
 
 5. To^ produce jpoetry that is hard afid-xlear, -never blurred 
 nor indefinite. 
 
 6. Finally, most of us believe that conc^itration is of tiie 
 very essence of poetry. 
 
 There is nothing new under the sun, even the 
 word, "renaissance," means a re-birth not a new 
 birth, and of this the Imagists were well aware. 
 This short creed was preceded by the following 
 paragraph : 
 
 These principles are not new; they have fallen into desue- 
 tude. They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all 
 great literature. 
 
 It is not primarily on account of their forms, as is 
 commonly supposed, that the Imagist poets repre- 
 sent a changed point of view ; it is because of their 
 reactions toward the world in which they live. 
 
 •Now let us examine these tenets and see just what 
 they mean, for I have observed that their very suc- 
 cinctness has often occasioned misunderstanding. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 241 
 
 The first one is : "To use the language of common 
 speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the 
 nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." 
 
 The language of common speech means a diction 
 which carefully excludes inversions, and the clichSs 
 of the old poetic jargon. As to inversions, we only 
 need to remember Matthew Arnold's famous parody 
 on this evil practice in his essay, "On Translating 
 Homer" : 
 
 Yourself, how do you do. 
 Very well, you I thank. 
 
 But, until very recently, it persisted in our poetry. 
 One of the tenets in which all the poets of the present 
 movement, Imagists and others, are agreed, however, 
 is this abhorrence of the inversion. 
 I "ClichS" is a French word and means "stamped," 
 '^as a, coin, for instance. In other words, it is some- 
 thing in common use, and not peculiar to the author. 
 Old, faded_expressimis like " battlemented clouds," 
 and "mountainous seas," are clicMs. Excellent the 
 first time, but so worn by use_as to convey no very 
 distinct impression to the reader. As an example 
 of the ol3^ poetic jargon, take such a passage as 
 
 this: 
 
 To ope my eyes 
 
 Upon the Ethiope splendour 
 
 Of the spangled night. 
 
 It will at once be admitted that this is hardly the 
 
242 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 language of common speech. Common speech does 
 not exclude imaginative language nor metaphor; 
 but it must be original and natural to the poet him- 
 self, not culled from older books of verse. 
 
 The exact word has been much misunderstood. It 
 means the exact word which co nveys the writer's 
 impression to the reader. Critics conceive a thing 
 to be so and so and no other way. To the poet, the 
 thing is as, it appears in relation to the whole. For 
 instance, he might say : 
 
 Great heaps of shiny glass 
 Pricked out of the stubble 
 By a full, high moon. 
 
 This does not mean that the stones are really of 
 glass, but that they so appear in the bright moon- 
 
 Jight. It is the eocact word to describe the effect. 
 
 I In short, the exactness is determined by the co ntent 
 The habit of choosing a word as unlike the object 
 as possible, much in vogue among the would-be- 
 modern poets, is silly, and defeats its own object. 
 One example of this kind which was brought to my 
 attention some time ago was "a mauve wind." 
 That is just nonsense. It is not exa£t in any sense, it 
 connotes nothing. "Black wind," "white wind," 
 "pale wind," all these are colours and therefore do 
 not exactly describe any wind, but they do describe 
 certain windy effects. "Mauve wind," on the other 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 243 
 
 hand, is merely a straining after novelty, unguided 
 by common-sense or a feeling for fitness. 
 
 So much for the first Imagist tenet. The second : 
 "To create new rhythms — as the expression of 
 new moods — and not to copy old rhythms which 
 merely echo old moods. ... In poetry a new 
 cadence means a new idea." 
 
 This, of course, refers to the modem practice of 
 writing largely in the free forms. It is true that 1 
 modern subjects, modern habits of mind, seem to 
 find more satisfactory- -expression in vers libre and 
 "polyphonic prose" than in metrical verse. It is 
 also true that "a new cadence means a new idea." 
 Not, as has been stated by hostile critics, that the 
 cadence engenders the idea; quite the contrary, it 
 means that the idea clothes itself naturally in an 
 appropriate novelty of rhythm. Very slight and 
 subtle it may be, but adequate. The Imagist poets 
 "do not insist upon free-verse as the only method of 
 writing poetry." In fact, the jXQup are somewhat 
 divided in their practice here. 
 
 This brings us to the third tenet: "To allow 
 absolute freedom in the choice of subject." Again, 
 over this passage, misunderstandings have arisen. 
 "How can the choice of subject be absolutely un- 
 restricted?" — -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. To make this passage intelligible to 
 
|.4 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 ly others, it would be necessary to add "within 
 le bounds of good taste." Of course, what one 
 ;rson might consider good taste another might 
 linlc the reverse of it; all that the passage intends 
 I imply is that this group restricts itself to no 
 irticular kind of subject matter. Old, new, actual, 
 ;erary, anything which excites the creative faculty 
 the individual poet, is permissible; they are 
 [ually Imagists and poets if they write about 
 icient Greece, or about a cluster of chimney-stacks 
 en out of the window. 
 
 Number four says : "To present an image (hence 
 le name ' Imagist ') . We are not a school of painters, 
 it we believe that poetry should render particulars 
 :actly, and not deal in vague generalities, however 
 agnificent and sonorous." 
 
 This paragraph has caused a great deal of confu- 
 an. It has been construed_to jjieaa that Imagist 
 )etry is chiefly concerned with the presentation of 
 ctures. Why this should have come about, con- 
 dering that the words, "we are not a school of 
 linters," were intended to offset any such idea, I 
 ) not know. The truth is that "Imagism," 
 Imagist," refers more to the manner of presentation 
 lan to the thing presented. It is a kind of tech- 
 ique rather than a choice of subject. "Imagism" 
 mply means — to quote from the second anthology. 
 Some Imagist Poets, 1916" — "a clear presentation 
 ■ whatever the author wishes to convey. Now he 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 245 
 
 may wish to convey a mood of indecision, in which 
 case the poem should be indecisive ; he may wish to 
 bring before his reader the constantly shifting and 
 changing lights over a landscape, or the varying 
 attitudes of mind of a person under strong emotion, 
 then his poem must shift and change to present this 
 clearly." ytmagism is prgsentati^ auaiat-xe pxesait a- c 
 tion, /For instance, Imagists do not speak of the 
 sea as the "rolling wave" or the "vasty deep," 
 high-sounding, artificial generalities which convey 
 no exact impression ; instead, let us compare these 
 two stanzas in a poem of Mr. Fletcher's called "The 
 Calm": 
 
 At noon I shall see waves flashing, 
 White power of spray. 
 
 The steamers, stately. 
 
 Kick up white puffs of spray behind them. 
 
 The boiUng wake 
 
 Merges in the blue-black mirror of the sea. 
 
 That is an exact image ; but here is another from 
 "Tide of Storms," in which the exactness of 
 the image is augmented by powerful imaginative 
 connotations : 
 
 Crobked, crawling tide with long wet fingers 
 Clutching at the gritty beach in the roar and spurt of spray, 
 Tide of gales, drunken tide, lava-burst of breakers, 
 Black ships plunge upon you from sea to sea away. 
 
246 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 This vivid " presentation of whatever the author 
 wishes to convey " is closely allied to the next tenet 
 of the Imagist manifesto, which is : "To produce poe- 
 try which is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefi- 
 nite." It must be kept in mind that this does not 
 refer to subject but to the rendering of subject. I 
 might borrow a metaphor from another art and call 
 it "faithfulness to the architectural line." Orna- 
 ment may be employed, so long as it follows the 
 
 j^ structural bases of the poem. But poetical jig-saw 
 work is summarily condemned. That is why, al- 
 though so much Imagist poetry is metaphorical,, 
 similes are sparingly used. Imagists fear the blurred 
 effect of a too constant change of picture in the same 
 poem. 
 
 The last rule is very simple, it is that "concentra- 
 tion is of the very essence of poetry. ' ' A rule, indeed, 
 as old as art itself, and yet so often lost sight of that 
 it can hardly be too often affirmed. How many 
 works of art are ruined by a too great discursiveness ! 
 
 /louremain concentrated on the subject, and to know 
 when to stop, are two cardinal rules in the writing of 
 poetry. / 
 We see therefore that these canons boil down 
 
 .. into something like the following succinct state- 
 
 3 ments j/Simplicity and directness of speech ; subtlety 
 and beauty of rhythms; individualistic Jreedom of 
 idea ; clearness and vividness: of presentation ; and 
 concentration. / Not new principles, by any means, 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 247 
 
 as the writers of the preface admit, but "fallen into 
 desuetude." 
 
 One characteristic of Imaeist verse which was not 
 mentioned in this preface, isi pugg estion — the imply-c_ 
 ing of something rather than the stating of it, imply- 
 ing it perhaps under a metaphor, perhaps in an even 
 Xess obvious way., 
 
 This poem of Mr. Fletcher's is an excellent exam- 
 ple of Imagist suggestion : 
 
 THE WELL 
 
 The well is not used now 
 Its waters axe tainted. 
 
 I remember there was once a man went down 
 
 To clean it. 
 
 He fotind it very cold and deep. 
 
 With a queer niche in one of its sides, 
 
 From which he hauled forth buckets of bricks and dirt. 
 
 The picture as given is quite clear and vivid . 
 But the picture we see is not the poem, the real 
 poem lies beyond, is pnly suggested. 
 
 Of the poets we have been considering in these 
 essays, Mr. Robinson is most nearly allied to the 
 Imagists in the use of suggestion ; but the technique 
 he employs is quite unlike theirs. In Mr. Sand- 
 burg's "Limited," which I quoted in the last chapter, 
 suggestion again is the poem, and his treatment of it 
 there is almost Imagistic. 
 
248 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 It must not be forgotten that however many rules 
 and tenets we may analyze, such mechanical labour 
 can never give the touchstone to style. That must 
 lie in a sense which is beyond reason. As Matthew 
 Arnold said of the grand style, ' ' one must feel it. " It 
 is possible to determine the work of different painters 
 by their brush strokes, but such knowledge is for the 
 expert alone, and then only for purposes of authen- 
 ticity. The layman who had no way of telling the 
 work of Titian from that of Watteau by any other 
 method than that of brush strokes, would make a 
 poor connoisseur. 
 
 I could go minutely into the work of these poets 
 and show how each differs from the other — the 
 varying modes of expression, the individual ways of 
 using words, the changing progression of the phrases, 
 the subtle originality of rhythms — but any one who 
 could intelligently follow such an analysis would have 
 no difficulty in determining Imagist work per se; 
 and those who could not tell it at a glance, would 
 find such hair-splitting dissection totally incompre- 
 hensible. 
 
 A few broad lines, then, shall serve us here, and I 
 trust that, before I have finished, the reader will be 
 incapable of making the blunder of that recent 
 critic, who placed Mr. Frost and Mr. Masters in 
 the Imagist group. 
 
 I have shown certain aspects of the Imagist idiom, 
 but we must not lose sight of the fact that all these 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 249 
 
 barriers are cirbitrary, and fade somewhat into each 
 other. Much of this idiom is applicable to the other 
 poets whom we have been considering, as well ; some 
 of it is peculiar to the Imagists. But it is principally 
 in their manner of dealing with the idiom that we shall 
 find the difference to lie. Let me insist once more 
 that Jmagism is only one section of a larger ijipyg- 
 i .ment to w hich the six poets of these essays all 
 ^.belong. 
 
 So much, then, for the idiom, at present. As to 
 the form s, principally verji-Mbre and "polypho nic 
 prose," I shall take them up later. Now we must 
 return to the poets themselves. The first of whom 
 I wish to speak is "H.D." 
 
 "H.D.," as I have already said, is a pseudo- 
 nym ; but a very simple and natural one. It consists 
 merely of the inititals of the lady in question — 
 before she was married, that is. For "H.D."'s 
 name was Hilda Doolittle, and she is the daughter of 
 Professor Charles L. Doolittle, for many years Direc- 
 tor of the Flower Astronomical Observatory of the 
 University of Pennsylvania. 
 
 Professor Doolittle has been twice married. His 
 second wife was Miss Helen Eugenia Wolle, a name 
 which hints of a German ancestry. Probably Mrs. 
 Doolittle comes from that fine, undeviating people, 
 known for more than two hundred years as the 
 Pennsylvania Dutch. 
 
 Mrs. Doolittle married her husband before he was 
 
250 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 called to the University, and Hilda Doolittle was 
 born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on September 
 ID, 1886. Before she was old enough to go to 
 school, however. Professor Doolittle accepted the 
 position of Director of the Flower Observatory, and 
 the family moved to a suburb of Philadelphia. Here 
 the little girl went to the public school in the vil- 
 lage, being sent later to a private school, the Gor- 
 don School, in West Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle 
 stayed at the Gordon School until 1902, when she 
 left to be prepared for college at the Friends' Central 
 School. She entered Bryn Mawr College in the 
 Autumn of 1904. 
 
 A good student she must have been, and excellently 
 grounded, since she reads Greek and Latin aseasily 
 as most people do French ; but eagerness often defeats 
 its own object, and Hilda Doolittle was obliged to 
 give up her college course in her sophomore year, 
 as her health had completely broken down. 
 
 We can imagine the next few years, although we 
 know very little about them. The slow recovery of 
 health ; the trial flights of literature ; the loneliness 
 of surrounding, from which all the poets of this 
 generation have suffered. The interest in poetry 
 was not yet. Each of our six poets has fought the 
 demons of indifference and despair, fought through 
 to freedom in his or her way ; and, in so doing, each 
 apparently alone and all, unconsciously, together, 
 they have made this poetic renaissance, this new 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 251 
 
 movement, of which I have been speaking. Not that 
 Hilda Doolittle wrote poetry in those days ; she had 
 not yet found out her possibilities in that line. 
 She wrote stories, and mostly stories for children, 
 some of which appeared in a Presbyterian paper in 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 It is hard to conceive of these little tales, in view of 
 the exquisite work of "H.D." 's maturity ; it is hard 
 to figure the shy, reticent girl plodding up and down 
 the straight Philadelphia streets, bitterly suppressing 
 a desire for beauty which nothing about her satisfied. 
 "H .D." ha s a strange, faun-like, drya d-like quality, 
 she seen is always alT though jiisfstartled from a 
 brake of fern ; and if this is so now that she has written 
 SnBTjustiHed her longings, what must it have been 
 when it was all beyond the dim horizon of the 
 future and she herself alone believed. 
 
 In 191 1, Miss Doolittle went abroad, on what, at 
 the time, was intended to be merely a Summer trip. 
 But, as was natural, she found in Italy and France 
 solace for that desire for beauty which had been 
 torturing her for so many years. London, too, sup- 
 plied her with the stimulus of literary companion- 
 ship. As I pointed out in speaking of Robert Frost, 
 London at that time was a very El Dorado for young 
 poets, and Hilda Doolittle had at last found her true 
 niche in the world of art, she was indubitably a poet. 
 She had known Ezra Pound years before, when he 
 was still living in Philadelphia, and she soon be- 
 
252 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 came a member of that small band of insurgent poets 
 of which he was one. 
 
 It only needed the spark of sympathy and com- 
 petition to start the smouldering poetry in Miss 
 Doolittle to bright flame. She began to write, and 
 ^/^hat she wrote was as perfect as a clear intaglio^^ 
 Mr. Pound, with that rare instinct for good work 
 which is undeniably his, at once perceived her re- 
 markable talent. Acting as the London agent for 
 " Poetry," he accepted some of her poems, and, using 
 them as an example of a kind of writing in which he 
 and others were becoming interested, he persuaded 
 her to appear under the banner of the new school. 
 Her poems were printed in the January, 1913, 
 number of "Poetry," over the pseudonym "H.D.," 
 followed by the word "Imagist." 
 
 The work of "H.D." (as she prefers to be called, 
 and as I shall speak of her in future) is so homogene- 
 ous, and shows so little change, except for a slight 
 widening and deepening as she proceeds, that I shall 
 abandon my usual custom in mentioning it. Instead 
 of interlarding criticism with biography, I shall first 
 set down the few facts of her life, and reserve all 
 consideration of her work until after they are dis- 
 posed of. 
 ~ "H.D."'s life is that of^^ true artist. It is one 
 of internal mental and emotional experiences, not of 
 external events/ 
 
 One of the little band of poets with whom " H.D." 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 253 
 
 now identified herself was Richard Aldington, the 
 well-known Imagist. Like "H.D.," Mr. Aldington 
 was fascinated by Greek culture ; the flawless purity 
 of Greek models was a perpetual source of delight to 
 him. Mr. Pound, in his life of the young Vorticist 
 sculptor, Gaudier Brzeska, has told of the long dis- 
 cussions between these two ; Brzeska wishing to cut 
 away all bonds with the past, Richard Aldington 
 firmly insisting that the Hellenic outlook was more 
 needed to-day than ever. 
 
 In this age of pedantic learning, or no learning at 
 all, it is strange to find two young people reading 
 Greek "for fun." But this was just what "H.D." 
 ^nd Mr. Aldington did. The Imagists seem to have 
 a natural flair for languages. The so-called dead 
 languages are very living to most of them, and 
 modern languages they all know well, some one, some 
 two, most of them three. There is nothing bookish 
 about this. It comes as easily to them as slang 
 comes to some people. 
 
 "H.D." and Richard Aldington were married on 
 October 18, 1913. 
 
 During the Winter of 1913, Mr. Pound collected 
 a number of poems illustrating the Imagist point of 
 view, and they were printed together in a little 
 volume entitled: "Des Imagistes," in April, 1914. 
 The book was brought out by Messrs. Albert and 
 Charles Boni, of New York. The work of both "H. 
 D." and Mr. Aldington was excellently represented 
 
254 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 In this collection. But the publishers were young 
 men, only just starting, they had not much money 
 to spend on advertisements, the point of view was 
 a departure from accepted standards, and, to add 
 to the confusion, the volume had no explanatory 
 preface. It was much, but very ignorantly, re- 
 viewed. It found only a handful of admirers. 
 Truly, the Imagists have had an exceedingly hard 
 struggle. 
 When I returned to London in the Summer of 
 
 -1914, yche great preoccupation of all the group was 
 how to make people understand what they were 
 trying to do. x How get past prejudiced editors and 
 reviewers and appeal intelligently to the reading 
 public. It was decided, after much discussion, that 
 we should again appear together, and continue 
 doing so until people at least understood our kind of 
 poetry. Mr. Pound withdrew from the group and 
 
 .joined the Vorticists, and other contributors were 
 excluded for various reasons, but we were joined by 
 Mr. John Gould Fletcher and Mr. D. H. Lawrence. 
 It was agreed that the authors should be arranged 
 alphabetically according to their names, so that there 
 should be no question of precedence ; and our desire 
 for democracy went to even greater lengths: each 
 author was permitted to make his own selection of 
 his own poems, but any poem could be excluded by 
 one veto, and everyone had a right to veto whatever 
 
 ., they chose. It speaks well for the poets' devotion 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 255 
 
 to the cause, when I say that no one was permitted to 
 grumble when his pet contribution was vetoed ; smd 
 for their confidence in one another's integrity, when 
 I add that no suspicion of professional jealousy has 
 ever come between them. I returned to America in 
 September, 1914, and I brought with me the manu- 
 script of "Some Imagist Poets." 
 
 I soon found a publisher in Messrs. Houghton, 
 Mifflin and Company to whose cordial sympathy the 
 group owes much. In the name of my confreres, I 
 signed a contract with them for three years, or rather 
 for three separate anthologies to be issued at yearly 
 intervals. The first appeared in the Spring of 191 5, 
 and the next two in 19 16 and 191 7, respectively. 
 
 There will be no more volumes of "Some Imagist 
 Poets." The collection has done its work. These 
 three little books are the germ, the nucleus, of the 
 school ; its spreading out, its amplification, must be 
 sought in the published work of the individual 
 members of the group. 
 
 There is very little more to record about "H. 
 D." 's life. During the Winter of 1913 and 1914, she 
 and her husband, with the collaboration of one or two 
 other poets, and under the auspices of "The Egoist" 
 (a London weekly of which Mr. Aldington was associ- 
 ate editor), published a number of translations from 
 the Greek and Latin poets, in small unpreten- 
 tious pamphlets. The series was called, "The 
 Poets' Translation Series." So beautiful were these 
 
256 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 translations, particularly "H.D."'s "Choruses from 
 Iphigeneia in Aulis," that the well-known scholar, 
 Professor Mackail, wrote an article in praise of 
 them in the London "Times." 
 
 The series was successful from every point of view, 
 and a new series was planned, but had to be abjm- 
 doned on Mr. Aldington's joining the army. Since 
 his departure for "somewhere in France," "H.D." 
 has taken his position on the staff of "The Egoist." 
 
 It is now time to consider "H.D."'s work. 
 / On the first appearance of these short, concen- 
 trated poems, many "smart" critics likened them 
 to carved cherry-stones, and dismissed them as 
 something too inconsiderable to be taken seriously. 
 But since when has bulk been the touchstone of art ? 
 " Cherry-stones " was a poor simile ; "exquisite cam- 
 eos and intaglios," would have been a more exact 
 definition. These poems are fragile as shells, and 
 as transparent, but their modelling is as carefully 
 done as that of a statue of Parian marble. 
 
 Writing in a highly and most carefully wrought 
 vers libre, "H.D."'s poems achieve a beauty of 
 cadence which has been surpassed by no other vers 
 libriste. Indeed, her subtly changing rhythms are 
 almost without an equal. Never, in her verse, do 
 we find a prose suggestion. Hers are not, as some 
 of her husband's are, the piquant paradoxes of 
 romance springing out of plain fact. Her poems are 
 kept to a key ; the key of haunted woodland, of 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 257 
 
 nymph-bearing sea. Reading them, we hear pipe 
 strains lost in the mists of forests, we hear voices 
 calling through the wash of waves. They remind 
 me of a story I once read by a French author, in 
 which an ancient shell preserved within it a few 
 moments of a siren's song. I seem to hear in "H. 
 D."'s work echoes of a beauty long departed. 1 
 
 Not that these poems, as has been so often as- 
 serted, are copies of the Greek. Often employing 
 Greek names, stilL the poems have no real Hellenic 
 prototype. Rather is it that "H.D." dwells in a 
 world of her own longings, builded of remembered 
 things, or things read of and delighted in. With 
 this, with that, she makes her picture; and, when 
 finished, it resembles nothing but itself. 
 
 To this poet, beauty is a thing so sharp as to be 
 painful, delight so poignant it can scarcely be borne. 
 Her extreme sensitiveness turns appreciation to 
 exquisite suffering. Yet, again and again, she flings 
 herself bravely upon the spears of her own reactions. 
 
 Here is a poem which shows her shrinking from 
 this piercing appreciation of the beauty of nature : 
 
 ORCHARD 
 
 I saw the first pear 
 
 as it fell — 
 
 the honey-seeking, golden-banded, 
 
 the yellow swarm 
 
 was not more fleet than I, 
 
258 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 (spare us from loveliness) 
 
 and I f eU prostrate 
 
 crjdng: 
 
 you have flayed us 
 
 with your blossoms, 
 
 spare us the beauty 
 
 of fruit-trees. 
 
 The honey-seeking 
 paused not, 
 
 the air thundered their song, 
 and I alone was prostrate. 
 
 rough-hewn 
 god of the orchard, 
 
 1 bring you an offering — 
 do you, alone unbeautiful, 
 son of the god, 
 
 spare us from loveliness : 
 
 these fallen hazel-nuts, 
 
 stripped late of their green sheaths, 
 
 grapes, red-purple, 
 
 their berries 
 
 dripping with wine, 
 
 pomegranates already broken, 
 
 and shrunken figs 
 
 and quinces untouched, 
 
 I bring you as offering. 
 
 This next one again gives the ache of weariness 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 259 
 
 which comes when one has been stretching the cords 
 of wonder for a long time : 
 
 SHELTERED GARDEN 
 
 I have had enough. 
 I gasp for breath. 
 
 Every way ends, every road, 
 
 every foot-path leads at last 
 
 to the hill-crest — 
 
 then you retrace your steps, 
 
 or find the same slope on the other side, 
 
 precipitate. 
 
 I have had enough — 
 
 border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-Ulies, 
 
 herbs, sweet-cress. 
 
 O for some sharp swish of a branch — 
 
 there is no scent of resin 
 
 in this place, 
 
 no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, 
 
 aromatic, astringent — 
 
 only border on border of scented pinks. 
 
 Have you seen fruit under cover 
 that wanted light — 
 pears wadded in cloth, 
 protected from the frost, 
 melons, almost ripe, 
 smothered in straw? 
 
26o Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Why not let the pears cling 
 
 to the empty branch ? 
 
 All your coaxing will only make 
 
 a bitter fruit — 
 
 let them cling, ripen of themselves, 
 
 test their own worth, 
 
 nipped, shrivelled by the frost, 
 
 to fall at last but fair 
 
 with a russet coat. 
 
 Or the melon — 
 
 let it bleach yellow 
 
 in the winter light, 
 
 even tart to the taste — 
 
 it is better to taste of frost — 
 
 the exquisite frost — 
 
 than of wadding and of dead grass. 
 
 For this beauty, 
 
 beauty without strength, 
 
 chokes out life. 
 
 I want wind to break, 
 
 scatter these pink-stalks, 
 
 snap off their spiced heads, 
 
 fling them about with dead leaves — 
 
 spread the paths with twigs, 
 
 limbs broken off, 
 
 trail great pine branches, 
 
 hurled from some far wood 
 
 right across the melon-patch. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 261 
 
 break pear and quince — 
 leave half -trees, torn, twisted 
 but showing the fight was valiant. 
 
 to blot out this garden 
 to forget, to find a new beauty 
 in some terrible 
 wind-tortured place. 
 
 The poet is, like Robert Frost, suffering from a too 
 minute and impressing_observation — observation 
 and its correlative, imagination ; and the very hair- 
 strokes of her ordered art force a cry for rest and 
 disorder. She desires : 
 
 . . a new beauty 
 in some terrible 
 wind-tortured place. 
 
 But the "new beauty" which "H.D." is to make is 
 not that of wind-tortured places. Hers is an art of 
 balance, of repose, of mellowness and charm. ILimi- \ 
 tations are hard things to submit to, and yet every 
 poet, no less than every person, must bow to them. / 
 We have watched Mr. Masters rebelling against his. 
 That poet is happy indeed who can express himself 
 in divers moods, and ease the strain of one by his 
 ability to experience another. 
 
 In both^ these poems, notice the beautiful curves 
 of the cadences. "H.D."'s cadences are always 
 
262 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 very marked, yet never is there a hint of a metrical 
 line. Her practice, and that of her husband, Mr. 
 Aldington, is absolutely to abandon the rhythms of 
 metre when writing cadenced verse. Some vers 
 librisies permit themselves occasional lines which 
 might be timed by the old scansion, if only such lines 
 also fall within the circle of their cadence, but 
 "H.D." and Mr. Aldington never do. Free verse 
 within its own law of cadence has no absolute rules, 
 it would not be "free" if it had. I do not say which 
 of these two methods is the best. I am only point- 
 ing out a peculiarity in the rhythms of these two 
 poets. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot do better than pause here and 
 explain just what is vers libre, just what I mean by 
 calling it "cadenced verse." In the chapter on Mr. 
 Masters, I said that "vers libre was a verse-form based 
 upon cadence." In the preface to "Some Imagist 
 Poets, 1916," there is an explanation of cadence 
 which I will quote : 
 
 Now cadence in music is one thing, cadence in poetry quite 
 another, since we are not dealing with tone, but with rhythm. 
 Ituis-thesense of perfect balance of flow andjhjrthm. Not only 
 must the syllables so fall as to increase and continue the move- 
 ment, the whole poem must be as rounded and recurring as the 
 circular swing of a balanced pendulum. It can be fast or slow, 
 it may even jerk, but this perfect swing it must have, even its 
 jerks must foUow .the central movement. To illustrate : Sup- 
 pose a person were given the task of walking, or running, round 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 263 
 
 a large circle, with two minutes given to do it in. Two minutes 
 which he would just consume if he walked round the circle 
 quietly. But in order to make the task easier for him, or harder, 
 as the case may be, he was required to complete each half -circle 
 in exactly a minute. No other restrictions were placed upon 
 him. He might dawdle in the beginning, and run madly to reach 
 the half-circle mark on time, and then complete his task by 
 walking steadily round the second half to goal. Or he might 
 leap, and run, and skip, and linger in all sorts of ways, making 
 up for slow going by fast, and for extra haste by pauses, and vary 
 these movements on either lap of the circle as the humour 
 seized him, only so that he were just one minute in traversing 
 the first half -circle, and just one minute in traversing the second. 
 Another illustration which may be employed is that of a Japanese 
 wood-carving, where a toad in one comer is 'balanced by a 
 spray of blown flowers in the opposite upper one. The flowers 
 are not the same shape as the toad, neither are they the same 
 size, but the balance is preserved. 
 
 The imit of vers litre is not the foot, the number of Syllables, 
 the quantity, or the line. The unit is the strophe, which may 
 be the whole poem, or may be only a part. Each strophe is a 
 complete circle; in fact, the meaning of the Greek word 
 "strophe" is simply that part of the poem which was recited 
 while the chorus was making a turn round the altar set up in 
 the centre of the theatre. The simile of the circle is more than 
 a simile, therefore ; it is a fact. Of course, the circle need not 
 alwaj^s be the same size, nor need the times allowed to negotiate 
 it be always the same. There is room here for an infinite num- 
 ber of variations. Also, circles can be added to circles, move- 
 ment upon movement to the poem, provided each movement 
 completes itself, and ramifies naturally into the next. 
 
264 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Let us illustrate with this little poem of "H. 
 D."'s: 
 
 OREAD 
 
 Whirl up, sea — 
 
 Whirl your pointed pines, 
 
 Splash your great pines 
 
 On our rocks. 
 
 Hurl your green over us, 
 
 Cover us with your pools of fir. 
 
 It will quickly be seen that this poem is made up 
 of five cadences : "Whirl up, sea — "is one cadence ; 
 "Whirl your pointed pines," is another; "Splash 
 your great pines on our rocks," is a third; "Hurl 
 your green over us," a fourth ; and the fifth, "Cover 
 us with your pools of fir." 
 
 Now these cadences are made up^)f-^time-iHiits_ 
 which are in no sense syllabic. I mean that the 
 number of syllables to each unit is immaterial. 
 The words must be hurried or delayed in reading to 
 fill out the swing, that is all. The time units are 
 also an irregular measurement within the main 
 cadences. Some of the cadences are made up of two 
 such units, some of three, and, in the fourth line, the 
 last two syllables are in the nature of a feminine 
 ending, in that they are really an unaccented or 
 suppressed part of_^the first time unit of the fifth 
 line. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 265 
 
 Whirl up / sea — / 
 
 Whirl / your pointed pines / 
 
 Splash / your great pines / on our rocks / 
 
 Hurl / your green over us / 
 
 Cover us / with your pools / of fir. / 
 
 How nearly identical these time units are, is shown 
 by the following table. In January, 191 7, I made 
 some experiments in reading vers litre aloud into a 
 sound-photographing machine, through the courtesy 
 of Dr. William M. Patterson of Columbia Univer- 
 sity. The results of the reading of "Oread," as 
 recorded on the film and afterwards measured by 
 Dr. Patterson, are here given. The measurements 
 are of the intervals between the chief accents. 
 
 "The Oread:" (intervals between chief accents given in 
 tenths of a second, roughly estimated) 13 — 22 — 15 — 24 — 
 13 — 13 — 19 — 13 — 15 — 13- 
 
 It will here be seen that the greatest variation of 
 time length of unit is ii/io, or that between a 
 13/10 second and a 24/10. While, as Dr. Patter- 
 son pointed out, the interval 13/10 appears five 
 times in this short poem. 
 
 Of course, no one in reading the poem would have 
 such measurements in mind. They were recorded 
 by a scientific instrument while the poem was being 
 read in a perfectly simple and natural manner, but 
 they are interesting for purposes of analysis. 
 
266 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The cadences of vers Ubre are not all so simple as 
 
 this. But for that very reason I selected this to 
 
 (illustrate upon. No matter how changing and 
 
 {subtle, it is upon this principle that all vers Ubre is 
 
 constructed. 
 
 "H.D." has published only one book as yet — 
 "Sea Garden," issued by Messrs. Constable and Com- 
 pany, London, during the Autumn of 1916. "Sea 
 Garden" is a charming name for a book, and the 
 sea flower poems scattered through this garden are 
 extremely beautiful. Also, they show the changed 
 point of view of which I have spoken. What careful 
 observation is here ; and yet, rather an observation 
 by the imagination than by the physical eye, al- 
 though the imaginative impulse never jars upon our 
 sense of truth. I will give a few of these flower 
 poems. 
 
 SEA IRIS 
 
 Weed, moss-weed, 
 root tangled in sand, 
 sea-iris, brittle flower, 
 one petal like a shell 
 is broken, 
 
 and you print a shadow 
 like a thin twig. 
 
 Fortunate one, 
 scented and stinging. 
 
^H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 267 
 
 rigid mjrrrh-bud, 
 
 camphor-flower, 
 
 sweet and salt — you are wind 
 
 in our nostrils. 
 
 Do the murex-fishers 
 
 drench you as they pass ? 
 
 Do your roots drag up colour 
 
 from the sand ? 
 
 Have they slipt gold under you ■ 
 
 Rivets of gold ? 
 
 Band of iris-flowers 
 above the waves, 
 you are painted blue, 
 painted like a fresh prow 
 stained among the salt weeds. 
 
 SEA LILY 
 Reed, 
 
 slashed and torn 
 but doubly rich — 
 such great heads as yours 
 drift upon temple-steps, 
 but you are shattered 
 in the wind. 
 
 Myrtle-bark 
 
 is flecked from you, 
 
268 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 scales are dashed 
 
 from your stem, 
 
 sand cuts your petal, 
 
 furrows it with hard edge, 
 
 like fliat 
 
 on a bright stone. 
 
 Yet though the whole wind 
 slash at your bark, 
 you are Hfted up, 
 aye — though it hiss 
 to cover you with froth. 
 
 It is difficult to analyze the delicate art of these 
 flower-pieces. I think it consists largely in the. 
 crispness and accuracy of vision of the poet, com- 
 bined with clear, sharp consonsint sounds in the 
 verse ; again, of an original imaginative insight, kept 
 unsentimentally strong and incisive by a satisfying 
 but astringent cadence. 
 
 Of all "H.D."'s flower poems, the following is 
 to my mind probably the finest. It is a part of 
 a longer poem, "Sea Gods." These violets are the 
 offering brought to the gods : 
 
 SEA GODS 
 
 (■ But we bring violets, 
 
 great masses — single, sweet, 
 wood-violets, stream-violets, 
 violets from a wet marsh. 
 
"H.D." and John , Gould Fletcher 269 
 
 Violets in clumps from hills, 
 tufts with earth at the roots, 
 violets tugged from rocks, 
 blue violets, moss, cliff, river-violets. 
 
 Yellow violets' gold, 
 burnt with a rare tint — 
 violets hke red ash 
 among tufts of grass. 
 
 We bring deep-purple 
 bird-foot violets. 
 
 We bring the hyaciath-violets, 
 sweet, bare, chill to the touch — 
 and violets whiter than the in-rush 
 of your own white surf. 
 
 The repetition of the word " violets," is a daring 
 and dangerous thing, but the poet has so managed 
 this repetition that it is a beauty not a torment. 
 The masses of violets are heaped one upon another 
 until the sheer music of the poem almost obscures 
 the picture, fine though that is. Take the first 
 stanza, and note the word "violets," and the beauti- 
 ful qualifying words set to it : 
 
 But we bring violets, 
 
 great masses — single, sweet, 
 
270 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 wood-violets, stream^^iolets, 
 violets from a wet marsh. 
 
 For pure loveliness of adjective, listen to the last 
 line of the second stanza : 
 
 blue violets, moss, clifE, river-violets. 
 
 "H.D." is a great artist — repetitions where the 
 effect is enhanced by them,; but never a repetition 
 where most poets would be forced to repeat from a 
 paucity of imaginative images, or an ill-furnished 
 vocabulary. 
 
 "H.D." is peculiarly a^poet of flowers, and in 
 the very manner in which she uses her flowers, we 
 have hints of that changed technique of which 
 I have been speaking. Compare the violet poem I 
 have just quoted, with Keats 's "I Stood Tiptoe 
 upon a Little Hill," for instance. Almost all the 
 effects in Keats's poem are got by the use of similes 
 and metaphors : 
 
 Sweetpeas on tiptoe for a flight. 
 
 The clouds were pure and white as flocks new-shorn. 
 
 Bloomy grapes laughing from green attire. 
 
 clumps of woodbine taking the soft wind 
 Upon their summer thrones. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 271 
 
 Now take these lines from "H.D." : 
 
 We bring deep-purple 
 bird-foot violets. 
 
 We bring the hyacinth-violets, 
 sweet, bare, chill to the touch — 
 and violets whiter than the in-rush 
 of your own white surf. 
 
 There is one simile here, but it is employed more 
 as a statement than as a simile. That whole pas- 
 sage illustrates most excellently what Imagists mean '^ 
 by verse that is hard and clear. 
 
 "H.D." is not a poet of gre^t breadth of mood 
 nor of many moods. All her effects are delicate 
 rather Jiian broad. She is also essentially a lyric 
 poet. Even in those poems which aim at a sort of 
 narrative suggestion like "The Helmsman," "The 
 Shrine," "Pursuit," "The Cliff Temple," and "Sea 
 Gods," the poems succeed rather by their lyricism 
 ■ than by anything else. 
 
 THE HELMSMAN 
 
 be swift — 
 
 we have always known you wanted us. 
 
 We fled inland with our flocks, 
 
272 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 cut off from the wind 
 
 and the salt track of the marsh. 
 
 We worshipped inland — 
 we stepped past wood-flowers, 
 we forgot yovir tang, 
 we brushed wood-grass. 
 
 We wandered from pine-hiUs 
 
 through oak and scrub-oak- tangles, 
 
 we broke hyssop and bramble, 
 
 we caught flower and new bramble-fruit 
 
 in our hair : we laughed 
 
 as each branch whipped back, 
 
 we tore our feet in half btuied rocks 
 
 and knotted roots and acorn-cups. 
 
 We forgot — we worshipped, 
 
 we parted green from green, 
 
 we sought further thickets, 
 
 we dipped our ankles 
 
 through leaf-mould and earth, 
 
 and wood and wood-bank enchanted us — 
 
 and the feel of the clefts in the bark, 
 
 and the slope between tree and tree — 
 
 and the slender path strung field to field 
 
 and wood to wood 
 
 and hill to hill 
 
 and the forest after it- 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 273 
 
 We forgot — for a moment 
 tree-resin, tree-bark, 
 sweat of a torn branch 
 were sweet to the taste. 
 
 We were enchanted with the fields, 
 the tufts of coarse grass 
 in the shorter grass — 
 we loved all this. 
 
 But now, our boat climbs — hesitates — drops — 
 
 climbs — hesitates — crawls back — 
 
 O be swift — 
 
 we have always known you wanted us. 
 
 Yes, it is the lyric touch in that poem which de- 
 lights the reader. Such passages as : 
 
 We fled inland with our flocks, 
 we pastured them in hollows, 
 cut off from the wind 
 and the salt track of the marsh. 
 
 How apt and perfect is that expression, "the salt 
 track of the marsh," any one who has seen a wide 
 swath of rank marsh grass cutting into arable land 
 will instantly appreciate. 
 
 "We parted green from green" is a beautiful line. 
 The reader sees the variously tinted leaves and 
 grasses, and almost the shapes of them, one and 
 
274 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 another, growing thicker and darker to the lushness 
 and dimness of : 
 
 We sought the further thickets, 
 
 we dipped our ankles 
 
 through leaf-mould and earth, 
 
 and wood and wood-bank enchanted us. 
 
 The last stanza is an example of that elusive thing, 
 movement, which can be given more subtly in vers 
 libre than in any other form. Read it aloud, and 
 notice how the lines creep and waver, until 
 
 O be swift — 
 
 starts the boat darting toward land on the crest of a 
 sudden breaker. Yet, in this last stanza, IjTicism 
 gives place to drama, and this is so rare with "H.D." 
 as to be noted the more carefully when it does occur. 
 The sea shares " H.D." 's interest Avith flowers, and 
 her descriptions of it are no less accurate and vivid : 
 
 where rollers shot with blue 
 cut under deeper blue. 
 
 Of a cliff, she says : i 
 
 But you — you are unsheltered, 
 cut with the weight of wind — 
 you shudder when it strikes, 
 then hft, swelled with the blast — 
 you sink as the tide sinks, 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 275 
 
 you shrill under hail, and sound 
 thunder when thunder sounds. 
 
 of a shore : 
 
 Wind rushes 
 
 over the dunes, 
 
 and the coarse, salt-crusted grass 
 
 answers. 
 
 "H.D."'s work deals entirely with those things 
 which are constant and eternal. She seems quite 
 unaffected by the world about her. Cliffs, and sea, 
 and flowers, have always been the same ; in one 
 poem, "Cities," where she deserts nature for man 
 and his activities, it is in a pathetic endeavour to 
 believe in the beauty and use of a modernity in 
 which she feels she has no part. 
 
 Strange paradox ! To be the prophet of a renew- 
 ing art, and to spend one's life longing for a vanished 
 loveliness. It is only in the things which were and C 
 still are that "H.D."/finds beauty. It is not to her 
 that we must look for a revaluation of the terms of 
 beauty. Other poets are possessed of a vision which 
 can perceive a new beauty in the modern world ; 
 we shall see Mr. Fletcher doing this. But "H.D." 
 has no such insight. J" The everyday world startles 
 her as though she really were the dryad to which I 
 likened her at the beginning of this essay. 
 
 There are people who find this poetry cold. In 
 
276 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 one sense it is, for in it is something of the coolness of 
 marble, something of the clarity of fresh water. 
 But it is a mistake to suppose that this coolness, this 
 clearness, covers no feeling. The feeling is there, 
 but the expression chastens it. Let me mix my 
 similes, let me liken "H.D."'s poetry to the cool 
 flesh of a woman bathing in a fountain — cool to the 
 sight, cool to the touch, but within is a warm, 
 beating heart. Nothing could point out more aptly 
 what I mean than this poem : 
 
 CIRCE 
 
 It was easy enough 
 
 to bend them to my wish, 
 
 it was easy enough 
 
 to alter them with a touch, 
 
 but you 
 
 adrift on the great sea, 
 
 how shall I call you back? 
 
 Cedar and white ash, 
 
 rock-cedar and sand plants 
 
 and tamarind, 
 
 red cedar and white cedar 
 
 and black cedar from the inmost forest, 
 
 fragrance upon fragrance 
 
 and all of my sea-magic is for naught. 
 
 It was easy enough — 
 a thought called them 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 277 
 
 from the sharp edges of the earth ; 
 
 they prayed for a touch, 
 
 they cried for the sight of my face, 
 
 they entreated me 
 
 till in pity 
 
 I turned each to his own self. 
 
 Panther and panther, 
 
 then a black leopard 
 
 follows close — 
 
 black panther and red 
 
 and a great hound, 
 
 a god-like beast, 
 
 cut the sand in a clear ring 
 
 and shut me from the earth, 
 
 and cover the sea-sound 
 
 with their throats, 
 
 and the sea-roar with their own barks 
 
 and bellowing and snarls, 
 
 and the sea-stars 
 
 with the swirl of the sand, 
 
 and the rock-tamarinds 
 
 and the wind resonance — 
 
 but not your voice. 
 
 It is easy enough to call men 
 
 from the edges of the earth. 
 
 It is easy to summon them to my feet 
 
 with a thought — 
 
 it is beautiful to see the tall panther 
 
 and the sleek deer-hounds 
 
 circle in the dark. 
 
278 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 It is easy enough 
 
 to make cedar and white ash fumes 
 
 into palaces 
 
 and to cover the sea-caves 
 
 with ivory and onyx. 
 
 But I would give up 
 rock-fringes of coral 
 and the inmost chamber 
 of my island palace 
 and my own gifts 
 and the whole region 
 of my power and magic 
 for your glance. 
 
 How sad that is ! The loneliness of it ! An en- 
 chantress, mistress of trajisforming spells, poet of 
 submissive words, wielding power lightly, almost 
 with ease, but of what use is it when she is constantly 
 longing for one who is not there. "H.D." has set 
 this poem very far away. She has overlaid it with 
 plates and plates of wrought and beaten gold, but 
 still, in the final count, it is just the desire of a woman, 
 a simple, human woman, for the man she loves. 
 Cold indeed ! Cold as the words of cut meirble upon 
 a tombstone recording the anguish of a soul. 
 /To appreciate this poetry needs a certain knowl- 
 edge. "H.D." is indubitably a poet for poets./ It 
 is doubtful if the great mass of poetry lovers will 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 279 
 
 ever fully appreciate work of such a delicate perfec- 
 tion, but it is no less important for that. Few books 
 better repay study than "Sea Garden," not only can 
 any poet learn much from "H.D."'s method, the 
 poems themselves reveal new meanings as they 
 become more familiar. 
 
 The faults of such poetry are not in its treatment, 
 but in its very texture. This is a narrow art, it 
 has no scope, it neither digs deeply nor spreads 
 widely. Not that it is superficial ; it is quite the 
 reverse. But merely that "there are more things 
 in Heaven and Earth" than such poetry takes 
 cognizance of. "H.D." is not a great, poet, but^she 
 is a rarel y perfect poet. It is true that she employs 
 the same technique throughout her work, and that is 
 perhaps-monotonous to those who are not concerned 
 with its excellence. It also bears with it the seeds of 
 over-care, of something bordering on preciosity. 
 There is a certain thinness in the original conception, 
 and only the lustre of its polish saves it. But this is 
 a lustre known to no one else. The secret is "H.D." 's 
 peculiar possession. Her poems are native, per- 
 sonal, to a marked degree. They show no slightest 
 trace of those influences which until recently ruled 
 American art. ^Deeply affected by classic literature, 
 still it is only ais a blush of colour that we perceive 
 it in her work. The tricks of her manner occasion- 
 ally recall the Greek, but her thoughts are perfectly 
 her own.■^ Here is a fresh flower, sprung out of a new 
 
28o Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 graft upon an old stock. Here is the frank, unarti- 
 ficial paganism of a new world. Neither in point 
 of view, nor in technique, does this art resemble 
 any preceding English art, yet it is cosmopolitan 
 in that it is a fusion of much knowledge, all melted 
 and absorbed in the blood of a young and growing 
 race. She takes her good where she finds it, and the 
 perfect singleness of her aim has resulted in releasing 
 all her forces to concentrate them upon the simple 
 fact of beauty. There is no clipping her pattern to 
 a traditional mode ; there is no staining it for ulte- 
 rior ends. It is completely personal, completely 
 sincere. Meticulous, at times, undoubtedly, "H. 
 D." 's faults are obvious enough, because they are 
 also her greatest virtues ; but, in the narrow compass 
 in which she works, she has achieved a rare„and finely- 
 wrought beauty. 
 
 Nothing could better illustrate the wide latitude 
 within the bounds of Imagism than to turn from the 
 work of "H.D." to that of John Gould Fletcher. 
 Where she holds her work in the check of a faultless 
 taste, Mr. Fletcher gives his full range and so obtains 
 a grandeur akin to that of mountains and winds. 
 Both poets have a compelling need for beauty, but 
 where "H.D." retires within herself and finds it in 
 her own soul, Mr. Fletcher goes out from himself 
 and wrests it from the entire world before him. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 281 
 
 "H.D."' s colour s are clear and single, like Fra 
 Angelico's; Mr. FletcEer's are turgid, and imposed 
 one upon another, like Turner's. Turner is not a bad 
 prototype for Mr. Fletcher, each takes the every- 
 day world and colours it to iridesc6nt romance. I 
 can easily imagine Mr. Fletcher having painted 
 "Rain, Steam and Speed," for instance. , ' 
 
 John Gould Fletcher was born in Little Rock, 
 Arkansas, on January 3, 1886. His father was of 
 Scotch-Irish stock, the son of a pioneer who went 
 to Arkansas from Tennessee in the early part of 
 the nineteenth century. From pre-Revolutionary 
 days, the family had lived in Tennessee, but Mr. 
 Fletcher's grandfather was caught in the great 
 romantic Western exodus, and his son,- the poet's 
 father, was born in a log cabin in the then scarcely 
 settled country of Arkansas. 
 
 At that time. Little Rock was only a settlement of 
 a few dozen, houses, amd Mr. John Gould Fletcher, 
 senior, had/snly a backwoods education, but it seerns <; 
 to have sufficed. Again and again, in the history 
 of our country, we are struck with the extraordinary, 
 results of this apparently insufficient schooling./ At 
 the outbreak of the Civil War, this gentleman volun- 
 teered in the Confederate Army, serving until 1863. 
 He was promoted captain after the Battle of Chicka- 
 mauga, and after being mentioned in despatches for 
 bravery, was woimded at the Battle of Murfreesboro, 
 in January, 1862. 
 
282 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 It should be noticed that all the poets whom we 
 have studied come of sturdy forbears, and this is 
 particularly the case of those of the second and 
 third stages of the movement. The energy which 
 led their ancestors to war with physical conditions 
 has enabled them to war with mental. 
 
 After the war, Mr. Fletcher, senior, kept a small 
 general shop in Little Rock, of which he made such 
 a success that he was able to save enough money 
 to become a cotton buyer. In this business, he also 
 prospered, and with the proceeds took a pleasure 
 trip to Europe in 1873. A trip to Europe meant 
 more in those days than it does now, and it speaks 
 much for Mr. Fletcher's desire for culture that he 
 should have chosen to spend his hardly earned money 
 in this way. Returning to Little Rock, he married, 
 in 1877, Adolphine Krause. This lady was the 
 daughter of a Danish father and a German mother. 
 Her father had come to America in 1839, and became 
 a naturalized citizen ; her mother, a Hanoverian 
 by birth, had emigrated to this country in 1835. In 
 the tracing of racial traits, it is interesting to note a 
 certain strain of sentiment in John Gould Fletcher's 
 work, which he undoubtedly inherits from his 
 German and Danish forbears. We can also see a 
 love of the fantastic, a sort of allegorical, elfin qual- 
 ity which links him to these Northern, Teutonic 
 nations. 
 
 When the little boy was four years old, the family. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 283 
 
 consisting of his father, his mother, his two sisters, 
 and himself, moved into a large square white house ; 
 one of those high mansions, with pillared front, so 
 common in the South. It had been built by one of 
 the first settlers of Little Rock, and was old, as 
 Arkansas counts old, when the Fletcher family 
 bought it. It already had memories, not theirs, to 
 be speculated about. Layers of wall-paper upon the 
 walls, four and five deep, lent a suggestion of romance 
 to its faded rooms. This house is the background of 
 the poet's childhood. Mr. Fletcher is fortunate in 
 having one place which he has always looked upon as 
 "home." /Americans lose much in depth of charac- 
 ter and mellowness of mind by their nomadic habit 
 of life. A person whose childhood has been a series 
 of rapid arrivals and departures from hired lodgings 
 never gains the peculiar tenderness that comes from 
 roots long nourished in one soil. / 
 
 The profound impression which this house made 
 upon the poet is shown in his "Ghosts of an Old 
 House." Reading this series of short poems, one 
 sees the house, one feels it, and one knows very well 
 the imaginative child who lived in it. 
 
 This is the house : 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 The house that I write of, faces the north : 
 No sun ever seeks 
 
284 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Its six white columns, 
 
 The nine great windows of its face. 
 
 It fronts foursquare the winds. 
 
 Under the penthouse of the veranda roof, 
 The upper northern rooms 
 Gloom outwards mournfully. 
 
 Staring Ionic capitals 
 Peer in them : 
 Owl-like faces. 
 
 On winter nights 
 
 The wind, sidling round the comer, 
 
 Shoots upwards 
 
 With laughter. 
 
 The windows rattle as if some one were in them wishing to get 
 
 out 
 And ride upon the wind. 
 
 Doors lead to nowhere : 
 
 Squirrels burrow between the walls. 
 
 Closets in every room hang open, 
 
 Windows are stared into by uncivil ancient trees. 
 
 In the middle of the upper hallway 
 There is a great circular hole 
 Going up to the attic. 
 A wooden lid covers it. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 285 
 
 All over the house there is a sense of futility ; 
 
 Of minutes dragging slowly 
 
 And repeating 
 
 Some worn-out story of broken effort and desire. 
 
 Here is the little boy in his nursery, teased, even 
 then, by a desire for something beyond what even 
 his fancy could reach : 
 
 OLD NURSERY 
 
 In the tired face of the mirror 
 
 There is a blue curtain reflected. 
 
 If I could lift the reflection, 
 
 Peer a Uttle beyond, I would see 
 
 A boy crying 
 
 Because his sister is ill in another room 
 
 And he has no one to play with : 
 
 'A boy listlessly scattering building blocks, 
 
 And crying. 
 
 Because no one will buUd for him the palace of Fairy Morgana. 
 
 I cannot lift the curtain : 
 
 It is stiff and frozen. 
 
 This poem is the very nostalgia of remembered 
 childhood : 
 
 THE TOY CABINET 
 
 By the old toy cabinet, 
 
 I stand and turn over dusty things : 
 
 Chessmen — card games — hoops and balls — 
 
286 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Toy rifles, helmets, swords. 
 
 In the far comer 
 
 A doll's tea-set in a box. 
 
 Where are you, golden child. 
 
 Who gave tea to your dolls and me ? 
 
 The golden child is growing old. 
 
 Further than Rome or Babylon 
 
 From you have passed those foolish years. 
 
 She hves — she suffers — she forgets. 
 
 By the old toy cabinet, 
 
 I idly stand and awkwardly 
 
 Finger the lock of the tea-set box. 
 
 What matter — why should I look inside. 
 
 Perhaps it is empty after all ! 
 
 Leave old things to the ghosts of old ; 
 
 My stupid brain refuses thought, 
 
 I am maddened with a desire to weep. 
 
 Those three poems are so vivid, so full of personal- 
 ity, that, after reading them, one knows the wistful 
 little boy, avid of impressions, who read ' ' The Ancient 
 Mariner" in the shadow of the Ionic columns. Mr. 
 Fletcher tells us that he did not understand the 
 poem, but we can imagine how greatly its weird 
 images and uncanny music must have affected him. 
 
 Mrs. Fletcher was musical, with artistic interests, 
 and she loved to buy books. So the little boy had 
 
"H.D" and John Gould Fletcher 287 
 
 plenty to feed upon, particularly as he was encour- 
 aged to read by presents of books. He says that he 
 was very fond of "Tom Sawyer," and that the scenes 
 in the graveyard "sent shivers up and down my 
 spine and gave me an unquenchable taste for the 
 uncanny and weird." We shall see the truth of 
 this when we come to consider his work. 
 
 He was taught to read and write by his mother, 
 learning the former out of "Webster's Blue Back 
 Spelling Book," of which he has keen recollections. 
 When he was about seven or eight, teachers were 
 engaged for him, and he says that he began the 
 studies of Latin £ind German when he was only 
 eight years old. Certainly, Mr. Fletcher must have 
 been a very precocious little boy, for he distinctly 
 remembers "revelling" in Schiller and Uhland at 
 this period. 
 
 When he was eleven years old, in 1897, he was sent 
 to school for the first time, and here he fell in love 
 with Longfellow, Scott, and Tennyson. At this 
 time, too, he began to write verses. 
 
 In 1899, Mr. Fletcher entered the High School, 
 graduating in 1902. Some time in 1900 or 1901, he 
 was given a set of Poe, and the effect of such reading 
 upon the sensitive boy can be imagined. He was 
 even then enough of a serious artist to read, not only 
 the poems and stories, but the essays, and it was 
 quite natural that, to use his own words, he 
 "swallowed all Poe's theories wholesale." 
 
288 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 In 1902, he was seat to Phillips Academy, Andover, 
 to prepare for Harvard. Here, under a system of 
 compulsory gymnastic training, he gained in vigour 
 and physical strength, and from being a puny boy, 
 developed into a man whose body is strong enough 
 to bear the strain of an unusually fecund creative 
 faculty. 
 
 At Phillips Academy, he became interested in 
 chemistry, once more proving that true science and 
 true art are never far apart. Entering Harvard in 
 1903, Mr. Fletcher started for the first time to learn 
 French. His knowledge of Latin made the reading 
 of French easy to him, and he was soon embarked 
 upon a course of Gautier and Baudelaire. In Mr. 
 Fletcher, as in the other Imagists, we see the great 
 value of lingual studies. Who was it who said that 
 with each new language learnt one acquires a new 
 brain? This is certainly true if, for "brain," we 
 substitute "habit of thought." There is no better 
 training for the mind, there is no better method 
 of gaining vicarious experience, than the study of 
 languages. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher is peculiarly sensitive to the nuances 
 of tongues. (I shall show how sensitive in a moment, 
 when we come to consider his Japanese poems.) 
 The French language was just what he needed to 
 give his work that severe grounding in technique 
 without which no poet can ever be sure of mastery. 
 Words are stubborn things, it requires much train- 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 289 
 
 ing to make them docile to one's purpose. No 
 modem nation has achieved so perfect a control 
 of words as has the French. It was a happy 
 thought which turned Mr. Fletcher's attention to 
 French. 
 
 In the Summer of 1905, the young man took a trip 
 to the West, to California and the Yosemite Valley. 
 The West fascinated him. Again and again he 
 returns to it, most notably in his Arizona poems. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher, senior, died in 1906. He had not 
 sympathized in his son's literary aspirations, but 
 had wanted him to study law or go into a bank. 
 To this end, he had wished him to have a Harvard 
 degree. But the poet was too original, too restive 
 under m«ital control, to be happy learning in a 
 prescribed curriculum. He was too young to appre- 
 ciate that college courses are not designed for the 
 education of geniuses, but for "I'homme sensuel 
 moyen." Inheriting a small competence from his 
 father, he promptly left college and moved into 
 Boston, intent upon devoting himself wholly to 
 writing. 
 
 But Boston suited his needs at that time as little 
 as did Harvard. He, like "H.D.," needed the 
 stimulus of a more mellow surrounding. Realizing 
 this, Mr. Fletcher sailed for Europe in August, 1908. 
 He went straight to Venice, with a sure instinct for 
 what his life had lacked hitherto. Perhaps his mind 
 was too new a field for such impressions to allow of 
 
290 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 their becoming immediately transferable to poetry. 
 However that may be, I can recall no poem of his 
 which has Venice for a background. 
 
 Leaving Venice in November, he passed the Winter 
 in Rome, drinking in history, scenery, colour; and 
 reading as usual, in great thirsty gulps, first Shelley, 
 and then, perhaps more fortunately for him. Brown- 
 ing. 
 
 He stdyed in Rome until May, 1909, and then 
 moved to London, which greatly intrigued his im- 
 agination. It is from this moment that his real 
 career as a poet begins. By October, 1909, he was 
 definitely settled in London, and working hard. 
 When I first met him, he was living in Adelphi 
 Terrace, a place full of literary associations, past and 
 present. I remember thinking that it was an ideal 
 habitat for a poet. There we sat in the large, quiet 
 room, with its hard-wood floor, great writing-table, 
 and overflowing bookcases, and outside, through the 
 trees, the green Thames rolled slowly along, with its 
 constantly shifting pictures of lighters, steeunboats, 
 barges, and puffing river craft. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher lived in Adelphi Terrace until the 
 Spring of 19 14, when he moved to Sydenham, close 
 to the Crystal Palace, and it was during this time 
 that he sowed his literary wild oats, as he insists they 
 are, in the shape of five little books of poems, which, 
 with careless indifference to ridicule, were all pub- 
 lished in the same year, 1913, and from the presses 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 291 
 
 of four different firms. These little volumes are 
 out of print, with the exception of one, "The Book 
 of Nature," issued by Messrs. Constable and Com- 
 pany. 
 
 I think Mr. Fletcher is hardly fair to his early work 
 in his consideration of these books. With much 
 that was jejune, they nevertheless contained some 
 very interesting things. An attempt, in which he 
 followed the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, to 
 render the sounds of vowels in colour, achieves, to 
 my mind, a more satisfactory result than Rim- 
 baud's poem. Still, of course, it was something of 
 an imitation. 
 
 Let us compare the two : 
 
 VOYELLES 
 
 A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, bleu, voyelles, 
 Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes. 
 A, noir corset velu des mouches 6clatantes 
 Qui bombillent autour des puanteurs cruelles, 
 
 Golfe d'ombre ; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes. 
 Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles ; 
 I, pourpres, sang crach^, rire des ISvres belles 
 Dans la colore ou les ivresses p6nitentes ; 
 
 U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, 
 Paix des pS,tis sem^s d'animaux, paix des rides 
 Que I'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux ; 
 
292 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 O, supreme clairon plein de strideurs ^tranges, 
 Silences traverses des Mondes et des Anges : 
 — O I'Om^ga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux. 
 
 It is strange how tortured and exaggerated Rim- 
 baud's images seem. They bear only the most 
 distant relation to the letters. Although the open 
 sound of A, may be made, by a slight stretching, to 
 connote black when it is the French "noir" which 
 is used, there is no such approximation in the 
 other colour analogies, with the possible excep- 
 tion of O, for blue. Now, observe how he has 
 worked them out — arbitrarily, for the most part, 
 with very little phonetic effect to relate his colours 
 and images to his vowels. With the exception 
 of "^clatantes" and "puanteurs," we have not a 
 single A sound in the whole clause devoted to A, 
 unless we include the questionable "noir"; while 
 ' ' golfe d'ombre ' ' instantly throws a weight on O, which 
 is quite outof place in the A, section. E, begins better 
 with "candeur" and "vapeurs" and "tentes," but 
 falls entirely out of key in the next line where no E 
 sound appears, except in the unimportant second 
 syllable of ' ' ombelles. ' ' I , has ' ' rire ' ' and ' ' ivresses ' ' 
 to hold it in place, and these words may mitigate such 
 singularly unlike vowel sounds as those of "pour- 
 pres" and "sang crachd," if one has enough imagina- 
 tion to keep the red of the lips and the wine before 
 one, which is the more difficult as "ivresses p6ni- 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 293 
 
 tentes" may refer to intoxications which have no 
 connection with wine. In fact, one has a shrewd 
 suspicion that "p6ni tentes" is simply used because 
 of the rhyme. We have been told that U, is green, 
 and if we are willing to grant it, the lines which detail 
 that fact would be well enough in any poem which 
 had no phonetic end in view. As it is, one cannot 
 help smiling a little at a technique which was unable 
 to think of a single word with a single U, in it, except 
 "animaux," in which the U, being a compound, 
 loses its original pronunciation entirely. O, is the 
 most successful of these vowel analogies. ' ' Clairon ' ' 
 is such a strong word that it easily dominates 
 "strideurs 6tranges," and, in the same way, 
 "Mondes" takes precedence over "Anges" and com- 
 pletely suppresses "Silences traverses." The last 
 line is distinctly good until we get to "Ses Yeux," 
 but these words entirely upset the excellent sound 
 weight of the rest of the line. 
 
 This is Mr. Fletcher's presentation of the same 
 subject : 
 
 THE VOWELS 
 
 (To Leon Bakst) 
 
 A light and shade, E green, I blue, U purple and yellow, O red. 
 All over my soul and song your lambent variations are spread. 
 A, flaming caravans of day advancing with stately art 
 Through pale, ashy deserts of grey to the shadowy dark of the 
 heart; 
 
294 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Barbaric clangor of cataracts, suave caresses of sails, 
 Cavemed abysms of silence, assaults of infuriate gales ; 
 Dappled vibrations of black and white that the bacchanal val- 
 leys track ; 
 Candid and waxlike jasmine, amaranth sable black. 
 
 E, parakeets of emerald shrieking perverse in the trees. 
 Iridescent and restless chameleons tremulous in the breeze. 
 Peace on the leaves, peace on the sea-green sea, 
 Ethiopian timbrels that tinkle melodiously : 
 I, Iris of night, hyacinthine, semi-green. 
 Intensity of sky and of distant sea dimly seen. 
 Chryselephantine image, Athena violet-crowned. 
 Beryl-set sistra of Isis ashiver with infinite sotmd : 
 Bells with amethyst tongues, silver bells, E and I, 
 Tears that drip on the wires, iEohan melody ! 
 
 U, torrid bassoons and flutes that murmur without repose. 
 Butterflies, bumblebees, buzzing about a hot rose ; 
 Upas-flower bursting, thunder, furnaces, simset, lagoon ; 
 Muted tunes of the autumn, ruby, purple, maroon : 
 0, orange surface of bronze, topaz spotted brocade. 
 Sorrow and pomp of the Orient, colour and odour and shade, 
 Ebony and onyx corollas opening to the stm ; 
 O, lotus-glory Ols^mpian, glory of God that is One ! 
 O, crimson clarion horn that echoes on in the bold 
 Old omnipotence of power ; O, rosy glow of gold ! 
 These are the miracles and I make them day and night : 
 O red, U purple and yellow, I blue, E green, A black and 
 white. 
 
"H-D." and John Gould Fletcher 295 
 
 It is a purely arbitrary thing to give vowels colour 
 values, unless the colours can be made to spring 
 naturally from words containing these vowels. In 
 the piquant charm of such unexpected relations lies 
 the whole reason for such a suggestion in a work of 
 art. Mr. Fletcher is a more original poet than 
 Arthur Rimbaud, and has a finer ear. He justifies 
 his colours at the very outset in 
 
 Flaming caxavans of day advancing with stately art 
 
 and holds it admirably throughout. Those vowel 
 sounds which are unlike the particular letter in 
 question are so managed as either to remain sub- 
 ordinate : 
 
 0, crimson clarion horn that echoes on in the bold 
 Old omnipotence of power ; 
 
 or else to accord so perfectly that they enhance the 
 effect rather than detract from it : 
 
 U, torrid bassoons and flutes that murmur without repose. 
 
 The poem is a properly rounded whole, the ends join 
 to make a complete conception. The vowels have a 
 use in themselves as building material, and as such 
 the poet leaves them. 
 
 Undoubtedly, the initial suggestion of Mr. 
 
 Fletcher's poem came from Arthur Rimbaud's. 
 
 yBut poets have ever been a light-fingered gentry in 
 
296 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 "^ this respect, and Time, with a complete indifference 
 to moral considerations, invariably awards the spoils 
 to the victor./ 
 
 It is possible to trace the influence of various poets 
 in all these early volumes, as is natural in the work 
 of a young man. The fault lay, not in writing them, 
 but in publishing them. Mr. Fletcher is curiously 
 unselective always. He is constantly progressing, 
 and has scant sympathy for the phase just left 
 behind. 
 
 The years in London were full of mental expe- 
 riences. In 1909, he made a close study of Walt 
 Whitman, and it is strange that, in spite of this, 
 the one poet who seems never to have affected his 
 work in the slightest degree is Whitman. 
 
 In 1910, Mr. Fletcher paid his first visit to Paris, 
 and through reading a poem of Verhaeren's made the 
 acquaintance of the great body of contemporary 
 French literature. He plunged into it with his 
 usual ardour. When I first went to London, it 
 used to be said that Mr. Fletcher made a point of 
 reading a new French book every day. Certainly 
 he has done an unusual amount in that field. 
 
 But literature was not the only art which claimed 
 the poet's attention. He was much interested in 
 music, cmd also in painting. Not a concert of any 
 importance, not an art exhibition, took place in 
 London to which Mr. Fletcher did not go. His 
 knowledge of both music and painting is extraordi- 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 297 
 
 nary in a layman. But he is too wise to dabble 
 in the production of either. One art is enough for ^ 
 one man. Still, it is true also, that his poetry j 
 would not be what it is, without its musical and' 
 artistic connotations. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher says that it was the Post-Impression- 
 ist Exhibition of 191 2 that finally demolished his 
 conservatism. He realized that both music and 
 painting were employing a new idiom ; he felt that 
 poetry too must break the old bonds. This knowl- 
 edge freed him, as the knowledge of vers lihre freed 
 Mr. Masters. He determined to write as he felt, 
 with no regard to old rules or canons. The result 
 was his volume, "Irradiations," all written in May, 
 
 1913- 
 
 But publishers were wary, this poetry was too 
 new for them, and not a single London firm could be 
 found to undertake it. All through that Winter the 
 poems remained in manuscript, except for a few 
 published in "Poetry" and in the London "Egoist." 
 Mr. Fletcher was undaunted, however, and con- 
 tinued writing to please himself ; among other things 
 done at this time was his sea symphony, "Sand and 
 Spray," some extracts of which I quoted at the be- 
 ginning of this chapter. 
 
 When Mr. Fletcher read me these poems in Lon- 
 don, I was very much struck by them. They seemed 
 to me to open a door which had always remained 
 closed, I felt that the publication of the book was a 
 
298 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 prime necessity, and when I returned to America in 
 the Autumn of 1914, I brought the manuscript with 
 me, together with the manuscript of "Some Imagist 
 Poets," which contained Mr. Fletcher's "Blue 
 Symphony" and "London Excursion." 
 
 I had no difficulty in finding a publisher. Mr. 
 Ferris Greenslet, of the firm of Messrs. Houghton, 
 Mifflin and Company, a man of much literary 
 acumen and with a rare sympathy for good work in 
 all manners, instantly saw the value of these poems. 
 He accepted the book at once, and the volume was 
 published under the title, "Irradiations — Sand 
 and Spray," in April, 1915. 
 
 In a very interesting preface, the poet argued 
 in favour of vers libre, and for the first time in recent 
 years, made an attempt to analyze it. He says : 
 
 The basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some would 
 prefer to call it, cadence. This rh3rthm is obtained by min- 
 gling stressed and unstressed syllables. Stress may be produced 
 by accent. It may — and often is — produced by what is 
 known as quantity, the breath required to pronounce certain 
 syllables being more than is required on certain others. How- 
 ever it be produced, it is precisely this insistence upon cadence, 
 upon the rhythm of the line when spoken, which sets poetry 
 apart from jprose, and not — be it said at the outset — a 
 certain way of printing, with a capital letter at the beginning of 
 each line, or an insistence upon end-rhjrmes. 
 
 Now this rhythm can be made the same in every line of the 
 poem. This was the aim of Alexander Pope, for instance. My 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 299 
 
 objection to this method is that it is both artificial and un- 
 musical. In the case of the eighteenth century men, it gave 
 the effect of a perfectly balanced pattern like a minuet or fugue. 
 In the case of the modern imitator of Kipling or Masefield, it 
 gives the effect of monotonous rag-time. In neither case does 
 it offer full scope for emotional development. 
 
 I maintain that poetry is capable of as many gradations in 
 cadence as music is in time. We can have a rapid group of 
 syllables — what is called a line — succeeded by a slow heavy 
 one ; like the swift scurrying of the wave and the sullen dragging 
 of itself away. Or we can gradually increase or decrease our 
 tempo, creating accelerando and rallentando effects. Or we can 
 follow a group of rapid lines with a group of slow opes, or a single 
 slow, or vice versa. Finally, we can have a perfectly even and 
 unaltered movement throughout if we desire to be monotonous. 
 
 The good poem is that in which all these effects are properly 
 used to convey the underl3nng emotions of its author, and that 
 which welds all these emotions into a work of art by the use of 
 dominant motif, subordinate themes, proportionate treatment, 
 repetition, variation, — what in music is called development, 
 reversal of rdles, and return. In short, the good poem fixes a 
 free emotion, or a free range of emotions, into an inevitable and 
 artistic whole. /The real secret of the greatest EngUsh poets lies '-^ 
 not in their views on life, — which were, naturally, only those 
 which every sane man is obliged to hold, — but in their profound 
 knowledge of their craft, whereby they were enabled to put forth 
 their views in perfect form./ Each era of man has its unique and 
 self-sufficing range of expression and experience, and therefore 
 every poet must seek anew for himself, out of the language 
 medium at his disposal, rhythms which are adequate and forms 
 which are expressive of his own unique personality. 
 
300 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 This was at once an explanation and a challenge. 
 It was taken as both, but now that the opposition 
 has largely died away, we can read it quietly and 
 perceive its excellent logic and sensible exegesis. 
 
 For the book itself, it is very difficult to classify 
 these poems, even to describe them. Here is imagi- 
 nation only, the quintessence of it. Mr. Fletcher has 
 a fertility and vigour which is wholly remarkable. 
 
 I can conceive of an unimaginative person saying 
 that they can make neither head nor tail of these 
 poems. I say that I can conceive of such a thing. 
 But for me, and for many like me, they must stand 
 as inspiring interpretations of moods. Possibly 
 that is their best analysis : Mr. Fletcher's poems are 
 moods, expressed in the terms of nature, plus a highly 
 fanciful point of view. I admit that that confuses 
 rather than explains, but Mr. Fletcher's poems 
 have an organic quality which defies explanation. 
 They are as refreshing as an October wind, and as 
 elusive. 
 
 That is it. Go out on a windy Autumn morning 
 and try to describe the wind. It will slap you and 
 push you, it will flap away in front of you and scurry 
 over the sky above you. You can feel all this, you 
 can experience the wind, so to speak, but describe 
 it you cannot. Well, Mr. Fletcher can. Does he 
 do so by analogy ? A little. Does he name things 
 directly? Seldom. How does he do it? I do not 
 know. I can show you, but I cannot define. This 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 301 
 
 is a description of rain. "Description" is not the 
 right word, of course ; it is really an expressing of the 
 effect of a rainy day upon him. 
 
 VII 
 
 Flickering of incessant rain 
 
 On flashing pavements : 
 
 Sudden scurry of umbrellas : 
 
 Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm. 
 
 The winds come clanging and clattering 
 From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits : 
 They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom, 
 And the nistUng of innumerable translucent leaves. 
 
 Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain 
 Dripping from the eaves. 
 
 Could anything be better? We see the rain, we 
 feel it, and we smell the earthiness which all Spring 
 rain has. The first three lines, with the flickering 
 rain on the pavements and the scurrying umbrellas, 
 are exact description, of course. But the " bending, 
 recurved blossoms of the storm " is a wild imagina- 
 tive flight. And how well it makes us see those 
 round, shining umbrella-tops ! The next line is 
 straightforward poetry — "clanging" and "clatter- 
 ing " are good words for the wind. But what about 
 it coming "whipping in ribbons up summits"? 
 
302 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 That is certainly not descriptive, unless we assume 
 that the city is built upon a series of hill-tops. No, 
 it is another imaginative leap, and an absolutely 
 original one, for the effect is got in a new way. 
 
 The same thing is true of the next two lines, for 
 obviously no apple-blossoms are really blown into 
 the city from the distant orchards, but in this way 
 the poet has got the earthy smell into his wind. 
 The last two lines are a marvel of exact description, 
 with only the adjective "lazy" to unite them to the 
 imaginative treatment of the middle of the poem. 
 
 I have said enough, I think, to show Mr. Fletcher's 
 unusual technique. But let us make no mistake, 
 this is more than technique ; it is a manner of seeing 
 and feeling. I chose the rain poem because it was 
 a simple one to use for illustration, but there are 
 others which have a greater imaginative intensity. 
 This is a day of whirling cloud-shadows: 
 
 V 
 
 Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds ; 
 
 Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street. 
 
 Whirlpools of purple and gold, 
 
 Winds from the mountains of cinnebar, 
 
 Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and 
 
 balancing 
 Amid the vermiUon pavilions, against the jade balustrades. 
 Glint of the gUttering wings of dragon-flies in the light ; 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 303 
 
 Silver filaments, golden flakes settling downwards, 
 Rippling, quivering flutters, repulse and surrender, 
 The sun broidered upon the rain, 
 The rain rustling with the sun. 
 
 Over the roof -tops race the shadows of clouds ; 
 
 Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street. 
 
 What a movement that has ! We get all the effect 
 of horses galloping without the usual recourse to 
 anapestic metre, ^t is true that anapestic rhythm 
 appears every now and then, but so come upon and 
 again deserted, that its effect is psychological rather 
 than actual. There, also, are the imaginative leaps : 
 
 Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and 
 balancing 
 
 for instance. What have mandarins and palanquins 
 to do with the rest of the poem ? Nothing, if we are 
 seeking the relations of fact; but the Oriental con- 
 notations of these words throw a splendour and 
 brilliance into his clouds which no other words could 
 achieve. The lines : 
 
 The sun broidered upon the rain. 
 The rain rustling with the sun 
 
 might serve as an epitome of the poet's work. It is 
 lyric truth in its highest form. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher's observation is very minute and 
 
v 
 
 304 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 exact- This is the more remarkable when we think 
 how often he must have to subdue his imagination 
 to let reality print itself upon him with the force 
 which it does. He sees a sea-fog creeping up a 
 river : 
 
 In the grey skirts of the fog seamews skirl desolately, 
 And flick like bits of paper propelled by a wind 
 About the flabby sails of a departing ship 
 Crawling slowly down th e low reaches 
 Of the river. 
 
 The poet must have watched the inconsequential 
 fiutterings of gulls about a boat very carefully to 
 think of that simile of blown bits of paper. 
 
 In the poems I have quoted, there is a great varia- 
 tion of rhythms. No one is more absolute master 
 of the rhythms of vers liSre than is Mr. Fletcher. So 
 much is this true, indeed, that an Englishman ' has 
 written a paper upon this side of his work alone. 
 
 The following is a most beautiful translation into 
 a scene of that vague feeling of unrest which French 
 eighteenth century physicians called " la maladie 
 de I'aprfes-midi" : 
 
 I 
 
 The spattering of the rain upon pale terraces 
 
 Of afternoon is like the passing of a dream 
 
 Amid the roses shuddering 'gainst the wet green stalks 
 
 Of the streaming trees — the passing of the wind 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 305 
 
 Upon the pale lower terraces of my dream 
 
 Is like the crinkling of the wet grey robes 
 
 Of the hours that come to turn over the um 
 
 Of the day and spUl its rainy dream. 
 
 Vague movement over the puddled terraces ; 
 
 Heavy gold pennons — a pomp of solemn gardens 
 
 Half hidden under the Hquid veil of spring : 
 
 Far trumpets like a vague rout of faded roses 
 
 Burst 'gainst the wet green silence of distant forests : 
 
 A clash of cymbals — then the swift swaying footsteps 
 
 Of the wind that undulates along the languid terraces. 
 
 Pools of rajn — the vacant terraces 
 
 Wet, chill and glistening 
 
 Toward the sunset beyond the broken doors of today. 
 
 The slow, languorous rhythm of that poem greatly 
 heightens its mood of futile melancholy. It is all 
 in the choice of words, and the reader will note that 
 Mr. Fletcher pays as much attention to his verbs 
 as to his adjectives. The use of "spattering," in 
 the first line, gives at the very start the note of 
 desolation, heightened by the adjective "pale." For 
 this matter of verbs : the wet, grey robes "crinkle," 
 the trumpets "burst," the wind "undulates," and 
 this last is again strengthened by an adjective, when 
 the poet speaks of "languid" terraces. There are 
 beautiful, still lines, like 
 
 the wet green sHence of distant forests. 
 and this marvel of dignified gloom : 
 
 X 
 
3o6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 a pomp of solemn gardens 
 Half hidden under the liquid veil of Spring. 
 
 Slow, stately, the movement holds to the end. 
 
 This next poem is picture and movement in one, 
 so closely connected that they seem to melt together. 
 Notice the rising and falling of the verse, like the 
 thrown-up water column, to relapse, dropping, like 
 it, at the end. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The fountain blows its breathless spray 
 From me to you and back to me. 
 
 Whipped, tossed, curdled, 
 
 Crashing, quivering : 
 
 I hurl kisses like blows upon your lips. 
 
 The dance of a bee drunken with sunlight : 
 
 Irradiant ecstasies, white and gold, 
 
 Sigh and relapse. 
 
 The fotmtaia tosses paUid spray 
 Far in the sorrowful, silent sky. 
 
 One is tempted to quote a great many of these 
 poems, but it is hardly necessary, the ones I have 
 given sufficiently illustrate the poet's peculiar 
 method. Still, there are two more sides of this 
 original imagination which must not be passed by. 
 This is sheer fancy, but one so apt as to strike the 
 reader as inevitable: 
 
'H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 307 
 
 The trees, like great jade elephants, 
 
 Chained, stamp and shake 'neath the gadflies of the breeze ; 
 
 The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants : 
 
 The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies. 
 
 The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shah. 
 
 Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of those trees. 
 
 That is one of the most completely successful things 
 that Mr. Fletcher has done. It is extraordinarily 
 pictorial and imaginative. The trees, stamping, 
 shaking, lunging and plunging, but always "chained," 
 is a beautiful truism. Here, too, is one of Mr. 
 Fletcher's unique touches — the rhymes, "lunge and 
 plunge," coming in with startling effect in the middle 
 of an un-rhymed poem. But perhaps the best touch 
 is the "wrinkled" backs of the trees, in the last 
 line. 
 
 Another fancy, less joyous, more serious, is the 
 following : 
 
 XV 
 
 O, seeded grass, you army of little men 
 
 Crawling up the long slope with quivering, quick blades of steel : 
 
 You who storm millions of graves, tiny green tentacles of 
 
 Earth, 
 Interlace yourselves tightly over my heart, 
 And do not let me go : 
 
 For I would lie here forever and watch with one eye 
 The pilgrimaging ants in your dull, savage jungles. 
 
3o8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The while with the other I see the stiff lines of the slope 
 Break in mid-air, a wave surprisingly arrested, 
 And above them, wavering, dancing, bodiless, colourless, unreal, 
 The long thin lazy fingers of the heat. 
 
 It cannot be doubted by any one reading that 
 poem that here we have a new idiom, a new manner 
 of seeing, a new method of interpretation. The old 
 thoughts and attitudes are irrevocably departed. 
 There is no ancient animus here to cause bitterness 
 and regret. Mr. Fletcher is conscious of no neces- 
 sity to be other than he is. This is strong, nervous 
 work, untiring in its crea.tive vision. For its tech- 
 nical effects, there are so many that I shall only ask 
 the reader to notice carefully the last two lines. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher is a virtuoso of sound effects. These 
 passages from the poems just read will prove what I 
 mean : 
 
 Amid the vermilion pavilions, against the jade balustrades 
 The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies. 
 
 He is exceedingly fond of internal rhymes, and in 
 his hands these effects are more than "un bijou d'un 
 sou," as Verlaine called rhyme. 
 
 This is very strange, as in regular metrical verse 
 his rhymes are often far from happy. It is as if the 
 knowledge that he had to rhyme took away the 
 faculty. Where it is not imperative, it is often most 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 309 
 
 cunningly accomplished. But his sound effects 
 are frequently got without the aid of rhyme, for 
 instance : 
 
 A clash of cymbals — then the swift swaying footsteps 
 Of the wind. 
 
 I will quote one more poem from this book, for it 
 shows a new preoccupation on the part of the poet. 
 A more human interest. It is not expressed in the 
 terms of an imagined landscape, but directly, and it is 
 a side which is growing upon him ; as though more 
 and more overtones were deepening a beautiful, 
 individual note. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 I remember, there was a day 
 During which I did not write a line of verse : 
 Nor did I speak a word to any woman, 
 Nor did I meet with death. 
 
 Yet all that day I was fully occupied : 
 
 My eyes saw trees, clouds, streets, houses, people ; 
 
 My lungs breathed air ; 
 
 My mouth swallowed food and drink ; 
 
 My hands seized things, my feet touched earth. 
 
 Or spumed it at my desire. 
 
 On that day I know I would have been sufBciently happy. 
 If I could have kept my brain from bothering at all 
 About my next trite poem ; 
 
3IO Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 About the tedious necessities of sex ; 
 
 And about the day on which I would at last meet death. 
 
 All the poems in the volume are not so good as 
 these. Mr. Fletcher has eminently the faults of his 
 qualities. Such a fecundity of creation naturally 
 leads to the production of much that is below the level 
 of his best, and one of his marked traits is the un- 
 critical, unselective habit of mind I have already 
 mentioned. He has a curious desire to write in 
 series. As we examine his work, we shall constantly 
 observe this tendency. The method has certain 
 advantages, but its disadvantages are peculiarly 
 unfortunate in his case, for, when it comes to publi- 
 cation, he wishes to include all of any given series, 
 good and bad together. The result is a volume in 
 which the plums are scattered and lost in packing. 
 I think it is largely for this reason that his work has 
 not yet received the recognition it deserves. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher returned to this country in Decem- 
 ber, 1914, driven home by the war. After short 
 sojourns in New York and Little Rock, he settled in 
 Boston, and remained there, except for Summer 
 trips to the West, until May, 1916, when he returned 
 to England and was married on July 5, 1916, to 
 Florence Emily Arbuthnot. 
 
 In April, 1916, Messrs. Houghton, MifHin and 
 Company published "Goblins and Pagodas." This 
 book contains the "Ghosts of an Old House" of 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 311 
 
 which I have already given extracts, and a series 
 of eleven symphonies. 
 
 In this volume, even more than in "Irradiations," 
 the longing for poems in sequence leads to a plethora 
 of one sort of thing, and numbs the reader's interest 
 by an over-sameness of effect. In a long and intri- 
 cate preface, Mr. Fletcher explained his method. 
 One interesting passage will condense it for us : 
 
 A book lies on my desk. It has a red binding and is badly 
 printed on cheap paper. I have had this book with me for several 
 years. Now, suppose I were to write a poem on this book, 
 how would I treat the subject ? 
 
 If I were a poet following in the main the Victorian tradition, I 
 should write my poem altogether about the contents of this book 
 and its author. My poem would be essentially a criticism of 
 the subject-matter of the book. I should state at length how that 
 subject-matter had affected me. In short, what the reader would 
 obtain from this sort of poem would be my sentimental reaction 
 towards certain ideas and tendencies in the work of another. 
 
 If I were a realist poet, I should write about the book's 
 external appearance. I should expatiate on the red binding, the 
 bad type, the ink stain on page sixteen. I should complain, 
 perhaps, of my poverty at not being able to buy a better edition, 
 and conclude with a gibe at the author for not having realized 
 the sufferings of the poor. 
 
 Neither of these ways, however, of writing about this book 
 possesses any novelty, and neither is essentially my own way. 
 My own way of writing about it would be as follows : — 
 
 I should select out of my life the important events connected 
 with my ownership of this book, and strive to write of them in 
 
312 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 terms of the volume itself, both as regards subject-matter and 
 appearance. In other words, I should linlf up my personality 
 and the personality of the book, and make each a part of the 
 other. In this way I should strive to evoke a soul out of this 
 piece of inanimate matter, a something characteristic and struc- 
 tural inherent in this iaorganic form which is friendly to me and 
 responds to my mood. 
 
 In this preface, also, he maps out his series of 
 symphonies as the stages in the life of an artist. 
 This idea is not new, and we need not pause upon it 
 here ; in fact, these poems seem rather forced into 
 the design than written in accordance with it. The 
 symphonies themselves are the arresting thing, each 
 one in itself, and each built upon a dominant colour. 
 
 This is what I have called, in the preface to my own 
 book, "Men, Women and Ghosts," the unrelated 
 method. As linked to the programme of the artist's 
 life, these colour symphonies cease to be unrelated, 
 but taken each by itself they for the most part fol- 
 low it. 
 
 By the unrelated method, I mean a description 
 which takes trees, houses, people, all the many parts 
 of a landscape, merely as they appear to the eye or 
 ear, or both, and with no hint of the "pathetic 
 fallacy" intruding itself. Already, in "London 
 Excursion," Mr. Fletcher had experimented with this 
 method. In these sjmiphonies, it finds much fuller 
 expression. This "Green Ssmiphony" is a riot of 
 Spring : 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 313 
 
 GREEN SYMPHONY 
 
 I 
 
 The glittering leaves of the rhododendrons 
 Balance and vibrate in the cool air ; 
 While in the sky above them 
 White clouds chase each other. 
 
 Like scampering rabbits, 
 
 Flashes of stmhght sweep the lawn ; 
 
 They fling in passing 
 
 Patterns of shadow, 
 
 Golden and green. 
 
 With long cascades of laughter, 
 
 The mating birds dart and swoop to the turf : 
 
 'Mid their mad trillings 
 
 Glints the gay sun behind the trees. 
 
 Down there are deep blue lakes : 
 Orange blossom droops in the water. 
 
 In the tower of the winds, 
 
 All the bells are set adrift : 
 
 Jingling 
 
 For the dawn. 
 
 Thin fluttering streamers 
 
 Of breeze lash through the swajring boughs, 
 
 Palely expectant 
 
 The earth receives the slanting rain. 
 
314 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 I am a glittering raindrop 
 
 Hugged close by the cool rhododendron. 
 
 I am a daisy starring 
 
 The exquisite curves of the close-cropped turf. 
 
 The glittering leaves of the rhododendron 
 Are shaken Uke blue-green blades of grass, 
 Flickering, cracking, falUng : 
 Splintering in a million fragments. 
 
 The wind runs laughing up the slope 
 
 Stripping off handfuls of wet green leaves. 
 
 To fling in people's faces. 
 
 Wallowing on the daisy-powdered turf. 
 
 Clutching at the sunlight, 
 
 Cavorting in the shadow. 
 
 Like baroque pearls. 
 
 Like cloudy emeralds, 
 
 The clouds and trees clash together ; 
 
 Whirling and swirling. 
 
 In the tumult 
 
 Of the spring, 
 
 And the wind. 
 
 n 
 
 The trees splash the sky with their fingers, 
 A restless green rout of stars. 
 
 With whirling movement 
 They swing their boughs 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 315 
 
 About their stems : 
 
 Planes on planes of light and shadow 
 
 Pass among them, 
 
 Opening fanlike to fall. 
 
 The trees are like a sea ; 
 
 Tossing ; 
 
 Trembling, 
 
 Roaring, 
 
 Wallowing, 
 
 Darting their long green flickering fronds up at the sky, 
 
 Spotted with white blossom-spray. 
 
 The trees are roofs : 
 
 Hollow caverns of cool blue shadow, 
 
 Solemn arches 
 
 In the afternoons. 
 
 The whole vast horizon 
 
 In terrace beyond terrace, 
 
 Pinnacle above pinnacle. 
 
 Lifts to the sky 
 
 Serrated ranks of green on green. 
 
 They caress the roofs with their fingers, 
 
 They sprawl about the river to look into it ; 
 
 Up the hill they come 
 
 Gesticulating challenge : 
 
 They cower together 
 
 In dark valleys ; 
 
 They yearn out over the fields. 
 
3i6 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Enamelled domes 
 Tumble upon the grass, 
 Crashing in ruin 
 Quiet at last. 
 
 The trees lash the sky with their leaves, 
 Uneasily shaking their dark green manes. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Far let the voices of the mad wild birds be caUing me, 
 I will abide in this forest of pines. 
 
 When' the wind blows 
 Battling through the forest, 
 I hear it distantly, 
 The crash of a perpetual sea. 
 
 When the rain falls, 
 
 I watch silver spears slanting downwards 
 From the pale river-pools of "Sky, 
 Enclosed in dark fronds. 
 
 When the sun shines, 
 
 I weave together distant branches till they enclose mighty circles, 
 
 I sway to the movement of hooded summits, 
 
 I swim leisurely in deep blue seas of air. 
 
 I hug the smooth bark of stately red pillars 
 And with cones carefully scattered 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 317 
 
 I maxk the progression of dark dial-shadows 
 Flung diagonally downwards through the afternoon. 
 
 This turf is not like turf : 
 
 It is a smooth dry carpet of velvet, 
 
 Embroidered with brown patterns of needles and cones. 
 
 These trees are not like trees : 
 
 They are innumerable feathery pagoda-umbrellas, 
 
 StiEBy ungracious to the wind, 
 
 Teetering on red-lacquered stems. 
 
 In the evening I listen to the winds' lisping, 
 
 While the conflagrations of the sunset flicker and clash behind 
 
 me, 
 Flamboyant creneUations of glory amid the charred ebony 
 
 boles. 
 
 In the night the fiery nightingales 
 Shall clash and trill through the silence : 
 Like the voices of mermaids crying 
 From the sea. 
 
 Long" ago has the moon whelmed this uncompleted temple. 
 Stars swim like gold flsh far above the black arches. 
 
 Far let the timid feet of dawn fly to catch me : 
 
 I will abide in this forest of pines : 
 
 For I have unveiled naked beauty, 
 
 And the things that she whispered to me in the darkness, 
 
 Are buried deep in my heart. 
 
3i8 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Now let the black tops of the pine-trees break like a spent wave. 
 Against the grey sky : 
 
 These are tombs and memorials and temples and altars sun- 
 kindled for me. 
 
 If we remarked a new, and quite personal idiom in 
 "Irradiations," "The Green Symphony" carries 
 that idiom still another step away from tradition. 
 If we had no other poems at hand to prove that 
 these poets of the third stage are doing something 
 quite new and original, that one alone would suf- 
 fice. It is too long to analyze. But the reader 
 who has followed the analysis of the shorter poems, 
 will have no difficulty in tracking its effects in 
 detail. 
 
 Throughout these poems, no attempt is made to 
 follow regular symphonic form, the title seems to have 
 been given merely to indicate a certain musical, 
 rhapsodic treatment. 
 
 These symphonies are not all of equal excellence. 
 Each has interesting paissages, but those most 
 certainly successful are "Blue Sjonphony," "Soli- 
 tude in the City (Sjonphony in Black and Gold)," 
 " Poppies of the Red Year (A Symphony in Scarlet) ," 
 and the "Green Symphony " I quoted above. In the 
 less contained of these poems, the poet occasionally 
 loses himself in vagueness, his words run into a bright 
 mist, and cloud over the cU-ticulateness of his thought. 
 Mannerism rides him at times to the detriment of 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 319 
 
 his work, but the four poems I have named are 
 singularly free from this fault. 
 
 I have not space to pursue the course of these 
 symphonies at greater length. Mr. Fletcher is so 
 rich in original conceptions and treatments that I 
 can only indicate his work by outlines. 
 
 The anthology, "Some Imagist Poets, 1916 ," 
 contained a group of Arizona poems — they are the 
 burgeoning of that charm which the West has for 
 him — and a little vignette of skaters : 
 
 THE SKATERS 
 
 To A. D. R. 
 
 Black swallows swooping or gliding 
 
 In a flurry of entangled loops and curves ; 
 
 The skaters skim over the frozen river. 
 
 And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the 
 
 surface, 
 Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver. 
 
 Contrast that bright little picture with this 
 grotesque from "Ghosts from an Old House" : 
 
 AN OAK 
 
 Hoar mistletoe 
 Hangs in clumps 
 To the twisted boughs 
 Of this lonely tree. 
 
320 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Beneath its roots I often thought treasure was buried : 
 For the roots had enclosed a circle. 
 
 But when I dug beneath them, 
 I could only find great black ants 
 That attacked my hands. 
 
 When at night I have the nightmare, 
 
 I always see the eyes of ants 
 
 Swarming from a mouldering box of gold. 
 
 Or with this other, whimsical and weird, full of 
 strange suggestion : 
 
 THE YARDSTICK 
 
 Yardstick that measured out so many mUes of cloth. 
 
 Yardstick that covered me, 
 
 I wonder do you hop of nights 
 
 Out to that still hill-cemetery, 
 
 And up and down go measuring 
 
 A clayey grave for me ? 
 
 The poet's German and Danish ancestry is inter- 
 estingly in evidence in that little piece. Here is the 
 goblin quality of Hoffmann's " Die Serapionsbriider." 
 We feel a background of folk-lore, of gnomes and 
 pixies, and fused with it is the allegorical seriousness 
 of Hans Christian Andersen. This Teutonic and 
 Scandinavian mysticism persists long, as we noted 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 321 
 
 in reference to Mr. Sandburg. But it is an even 
 more remarkable atavism in Mr. Fletcher, enduring, 
 as it has, through nearly a hundred years of changed 
 environment. 
 
 No study of Mr. Fletcher's work would be com- 
 plete without a consideration of his "polyphonic 
 prose." "P olyphonic pro sfLJ' is not a prosejbrm, 
 although, being printed as pro_ se, many people have 
 found it difficult to understand this. It is printed 
 in that maimer ior^conyeiiience as it changes its 
 character so often, with every wave of emotion, in 
 facE The word "polyphonic" is its keynote. 
 ' ' Polyphonic ' ' means — many- voiced — and the 
 form is so called because it makes use of all the 
 "voices" of poetry, viz. : metre, vers lipre, assonance, 
 alliteration, rhyme, and^ return. It employs every 
 form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times, but 
 usually holds no particular one for long. It is an 
 exceedingly difficult form to write, as so much de- 
 pends solely upon the poet's taste. 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. It is an excellent medium for 
 dramatic portrayal, for stories in scenes, as it permits 
 of gre at vividne ss^fjresentation. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher has written some remarkable poems 
 in ' ' polyphonic prose. ' ' He uses it principally in those 
 pieces which are a sort of epic of place, and he has 
 achieved extraordinary effects with it in giving not 
 
322 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 only an atmosphere, but a whole historical epoch. 
 A series of poems on American subjects is done in this 
 way. One is of the Mississippi River; another 
 entitled "The Old South," is, as its name implies, a 
 sort of condensation of the feeling aroused by our 
 Southern States, particularly Louisiana; a third 
 is wound about the catafalque of Jefferson Davis 
 preserved in a museum in New Orleans. Perhaps the 
 best one which he has done is this of the clipper-ship 
 era. It illustrates his method of synthesizing a 
 whole period in a single poem, instead of allowing it 
 to be implied by one concrete example, as is the old 
 and usual way. The particular ship which comes in 
 from time to time is merely symbolic, and soon 
 merges into the whole. Throughout the poem, Mr, 
 Fletcher brings in snatches of well-known chanties 
 sung by the sailors of all sailing ships the world over, 
 but dating from the period in question: 
 
 CLIPPER-SHIPS 
 
 (In Memoriam — Ship W. P. Frye, sunk by converted cruiser 
 Eitel Friedrkh, 1915) 
 
 Beautiful as a tiered cloud, skysails set and shrouds twanging, 
 she emerges from the surges that keep r unnin g away before day 
 on the low Pacific shore. With the roar of the wind blowing 
 half a gale after, she heels and lunges, and buries her bows in 
 the smother, lifting them swiftly and scattering the glistening 
 spray-drops from her jibsails with laughter. Her spars are 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 323 
 
 cracking, her royals are half splitting, her lower stunsail booms 
 are bent aside, like bowstrings ready to loose, and the water is 
 roaring into her scuppers, but she stUl staggers out under a full 
 press of sail, her upper trucks enkindled by the sun into shafts of 
 rosy flame. 
 
 Oh, the anchor is up and the sails they are set, and it's 'way 
 Rio ; round Cape Stiff and up to Boston, ninety days hauling 
 at the ropes : the decks slope and the stays creak as she lurches 
 into it, sending her jib awash at every thrust, and a handful of 
 dust and a thirst to make you weep are all we get for being two 
 years away to sea. 
 
 Topgallant stunsail has carried away! Ease the spanker! 
 The anchor is rusted on the deck. Men in short duck trousers, 
 wide-brimmed straw hats, with brown, mahogany faces, pace 
 up and down, spinning the' Worn-out yams they told a year ago. 
 Some are coiling rope; some smoke; Chips is picking oakum 
 near the boats. Ten thousand miles away lies their last port. 
 In the rigging climbs a hairy monkey, and a green parakeet 
 screams at the masthead. In the dead cakn of a boihng noon- 
 day near the Une she lifts her spread of shining canvas from heel 
 to truck, from jib o' jib to ringtail, from moonsails to watersails. 
 Men have hung their washing in the stays so she can get more 
 way on her. She ghosts along before an imperceptible breeze, 
 the sails hanging limp in the crosstrees and clashing against the 
 masts. She is a proud white albatross skimming across the 
 ocean, beautiful as a tiered cloud. Oh, a Yankee ship comes down 
 down the river: blow, boys, blow: her masts and yards they 
 shine like silver : blow, my bully boys, blow : she's a crack ship, 
 a dandy clipper, nine hundred miles from land ; she's a down- 
 Easter from Massachusetts, and she's bound to the Rio Grande ! 
 
 Where are the men who put to sea in her on her first voyage ? 
 
324 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Some have piled their bones in California among the hides; 
 some died frozen off the Horn in snow-storms; some slipped 
 down between two greybacks when the yards were joggled sud- 
 denly. Still she glistens beautifully, her decks snow-white with 
 constant scrubbing, as she sweeps into some empty, sailless bay 
 which sleeps aU day where the wild deer skip away when she 
 fires her eighteen-pounder, the sound reverberating about the 
 empty hills. San Francisco ? No. San Francisco wUl not be 
 built for a dozen years to come. Meanwhile she hums with the 
 tumult of loading. The mutineers, even, are let out of their 
 irons and flogged and fed. Every day from when the dawn 
 flares up red amid the hills to the hour it drops dead to westward, 
 men walk gawkily, balancing on their heads the burden of the 
 cargo. Now the anchor is up and the sails they are set, and it's 
 'way, Rio. Boston girls are pulling at the ropes: only three 
 months of trouble yet : time for us to go ! 
 
 Beautiful as a tiered cloud she flies out seaward, and on her 
 decks loaf and stumble a luckless crowd, the filthy sweepings 
 of the stews. In a week, in a day, they have spent a year's 
 wages, swilling it away and letting the waste of it run down among 
 the gutters. How are these dead-beats bribed to go? Only 
 the Ann Street runners know. Dagos, Dutchmen, Souwegians, 
 niggers, crimp-captured greenhorns, they loaf up on the after- 
 deck, some of them already wrecks ; so sick they wish they had 
 never been bom. Before them aU the "old man" calls for a 
 bucket of salt water to wash off his shore face. While he is at it, 
 telling them how he wiU haze them tiU they are dead if they try 
 soldiering, but it will be good grub and easy work if they hand, 
 reef and steer and heave the lead, his officers are below, nmamag- 
 ing through the men's dunnage, pulling out heavers, prickers, 
 rum bottles, sheath knives, and pistols. On each grizzled, half- 
 
"H.D " and John Gould Fletcher 325 
 
 cowed face appears something between a sheepish grin, a smirk 
 of fear, a threat of treachery, and the dogged resignation of a 
 brute. But the mate — Bucko Douglas is his name — is the 
 very same who booted three men off the masthead when they 
 were shortening sail in the teeth of a Cape Horn snorter. Two 
 of them fell into the sea, and the third was tossed still groaning 
 into the water. Only last night the captain stuck his cigar butt 
 into one poor swabber's face for not minding the compass, and 
 gave Jim Baines a taste of ratline hash for coming up on deck 
 with dirty hands. Meanwhile under a grand spread of canvas, 
 one hundred feet from side to side, the ship rides up the parallels. 
 From aloft through the blue stillness of a tropic night, crammed 
 with stars, with thunder brewing on the horizon, a mournful 
 echo rises and swells : 
 
 "Oh, my name is hanging Johnny, 
 
 Away-i-oh ! 
 
 Oh, my name is hanging Johnny, 
 
 So hang, boys, hang." 
 The Great Republic, launched before thirty thousand people, 
 her main truck overlooking the highest steeple of the town, the 
 eagle at her bows, and colors flying, now in her first and last 
 port, is slowly dying. She is a charred hulk, with toppling 
 masts, seared gilding, and blistered sides. The Alert no more 
 slides pertly through the bergs of the Horn. The desolate 
 barrens of Staten Land, where no man was ever bom, hold her 
 bones. The Black BaUer Lightning, that took eighty thousand 
 dollars' worth of cargo around the world in one quick trip, was 
 hurled and ripped to pieces on some uncharted reef or other. 
 The Dreadnought disappeared in a hurricane's smother of foam. 
 The Sovereign of the Seas, that never furled her topsails for ten 
 years, was sheared clean amidships by the bows of an iron steamer 
 
326 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 as she left her last port. The slaver Bald Eagle cut an unlucky 
 career short when she parted with her anchor and piled up on 
 the Paracels where the pirate junks are waiting for every ship 
 that swells out over the horizon. The Antelope was caught off 
 the Grande Ladrone in the northeast monsoon; she's gone. 
 The Flying Cloud, proud as she was of beating every ship that 
 carried the Stars and Stripes or the St. George's flag could not race 
 faster than a thunderbolt that fell one day on her deck and turned 
 her to a cloud of flame — everything burned away but her fame ! 
 No more will CaJifomia hear the little Pilgrim's parting cheer. 
 The crew took to an open boat when their ship was scuttled by a 
 privateer. So they die out, year after year. 
 
 Sometimes the lookout on a great steamer wallowing and 
 threshing through the heavy seas by night, sees far ofi on his lee 
 quarter something like a lofty swinging Ught. Beautifid as a 
 tiered cloud, a ghostly clipper-ship emerges from the surges that 
 keep running away before day on the low Pacific shore. Her 
 upper works are kindled by the sun into shafts of rosy flame. 
 Swimming like a duck, steering like a fish, easy yet dry, lively 
 yet stiff, she Ufts cloud on cloud of crowded stainless sail. She 
 creeps abeam, within hail, she skips, she chases, she outpaces like 
 a mettlesome racer the lumbering teakettle that keeps her com- 
 pany. Before she fades into the weather quarter, the lookout 
 cries: "Holy jiggers, are you the Flying Dutchman, that you 
 go two knots to our one?" Hoarsely comes back this answer 
 from the sail: "Challenge is our name: America our nation: 
 Bully Waterman our master : we can beat Creation." 
 "And its 'way Rio ; 
 'Way — hay — hay, Rio ; 
 0, fare you well, my pretty young girl, 
 For we're bound to the Rio Grande." 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 327 
 
 What a splendid thing that is ! Full of movement, 
 so bright as to be almost dazzling, rough, lively, vig- 
 orous. The true epic of the fast- vanishing sailing ship. 
 
 Sometimes this sense of historical significance, 
 this poignant feeling for the romance of a time, finds 
 an even higher expression, and rises into pure sym- 
 bolism. I have referred several times to Mr. 
 Fletcher's "Lincoln." If the reader will recall 
 what I said in regard to the treatment of Lincoln by 
 three such different poets as Mr. Robinson, Mr. 
 Masters, and Mr. Fletcher, he will remember that I 
 spoke of Mr. Fletcher's treatment as raising Lincoln 
 to the veiled awe of a national legend. This is the 
 poem: 
 
 LINCOLN 
 
 Like a gaunt, scraggly pine 
 Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills ; 
 And patiently, through duU years of bitter silence, 
 Untended and uncared for, starts to grow. 
 
 Ungainly, labouring, huge. 
 
 The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches ; 
 
 Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunderclouds ring 
 
 the horizon, 
 A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade. 
 
 And it shall protect them all, 
 
 Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence ; 
 
328 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith 
 Shall strike it in an instant down to earth. 
 
 There was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow 
 
 darkness, 
 Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter ; 
 A darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards 
 
 into the earth 
 Towards old things ; 
 
 Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke 
 
 with God, 
 Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what 
 
 and found their goal at last ; 
 Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all 
 
 seemed lost 
 Many bitter winters of defeat ; 
 
 Down to the granite of patience 
 
 These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking, 
 And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it 
 The red sap to carry upwards to the sun. 
 
 Not proud, but humble. 
 
 Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through 
 
 service ; 
 For the axe is laid at the roots of the trees, and all that bring 
 
 not forth good fruit 
 Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire. 
 
'^H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 329 
 
 III 
 
 There is a silence abroad in the land to-day, 
 
 And in the hearts of men, a deep and anxious silence ; 
 
 And, because we are still at last, those bronze lips slowly open. 
 
 Those hollow and weary eyes take on a gleam of light. 
 
 Slowly a patient, firm-syllabled voice cuts through the endless 
 
 silence 
 Like labouring oxen that drag a plow through the chaos of rude 
 clay-fields : 
 " I went forward as the light goes forward in early spring, 
 But there were also many things which I left behind. 
 
 Tombs that were quiet ; 
 
 One, of a mother, whose brief light went out in the darkness, 
 One, of a loved one, the snow on whose grave is long falling. 
 One, only of a child, but it was mine. 
 
 Have you forgot your graves ? Go, question them in anguish. 
 Listen long to their unstirred hps. From your hostages to 
 
 silence. 
 Learn there is no life without death, no dawn without sunsetting. 
 No victory but to him who has given all." 
 
 IV 
 
 The clamour of cannon dies down, the furnace-mouth of the 
 
 battle is silent. 
 The midwinter sun dips and descends, the earth takes on afresh 
 
 its bright colotu'S. 
 
330 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 But he whom we mocked and obeyed not, he whom we scorned 
 
 and mistrusted, 
 He has descended, like a god, to his rest. 
 
 Over the uproar of cities. 
 
 Over the million intricate threads of life wavering and 
 
 crossing. 
 In the midst of problems we know not, tangling, perplexing, 
 
 ensnaring, 
 Rises one white tomb alone. 
 
 Beam over it, stars. 
 
 Wrap it round, stripes — stripes red for the pain that he bore 
 
 for you — 
 Enfold it forever, O flag, rent, soiled, but repaired through your 
 
 anguish ; 
 Long as you keep him there safe, the nations shall bow to your 
 
 law. 
 
 Strew over him flowers : 
 
 Blue forget-me-nots from the north, and the bright pink 
 
 arbutus 
 From the east, and from the west rich orange blossom. 
 But from the heart of the land take the passion-flower; 
 
 Rayed, violet, dim. 
 
 With the nails that pierced, the cross that he bore and the 
 
 circlet, 
 And beside it there lay also one lonely snow-white magnolia, 
 Bitter for remembrance of the healing which has passed. 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 331 
 
 I think that is the finest poem on Lincoln which has 
 been written. It has the emotional seriousness of 
 prayer. It was written in the Winter of 1916, before 
 the United States had entered the war, and it is 
 instinct with the anxiety of waiting, the anguished 
 desire for guidance. Lincoln stands before us, at 
 once a man and an aspiration, a recollection and a 
 goal. He is the symbol of our possibilities, the 
 reason for our courage. Gravely, like a funeral 
 march, with serene steadfastness, like the hope of 
 resurrection, the poem moves along, and the great 
 darkness of the opening lines yields gradually to the 
 lyric close. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher's later work shows a growing interest 
 in humanity. He is delving deeper into life, develop- 
 ing more knowledge and more tenderness. Hitherto, 
 he has seldom attempted the expression of human 
 emotions, but in these later poems are moments of 
 real understanding and poignancy. 
 
 It is, however, always in connection with some 
 scene or some historical event. He seems little 
 interested in persons for their own sake. He tells 
 no stories ; his dramas are epics of time, not of people. 
 Some critics will aver that this is the weak spot in 
 the Imagistic method, that this very manner of pres- 
 entation precludes the more intimate note of drama. 
 But I see no reason why that should be so. I should 
 say, rather, that it is mere coincidence which has 
 caused the Imagist poets to be markedly lyrists. 
 
332 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 It is quite true that neither " H.D." nor Mr. Fletcher 
 can approach the other poets of whom we have been 
 speaking in either narrative or dramatic pieces, 
 that they are both deficient in portraying human 
 feeling. But, granted this, I cannot find it to reflect 
 upon the method as a whole. It is wiser to con- 
 sider it as a limitation in the work of these two 
 poets. Where they have laboured to make a clear- 
 ing, others are at liberty to plant what seeds they 
 will. 
 
 These Imagist poets achieve niuch ; they pomt the 
 way to more. But they seldom touch on hunian 
 relations. There is a certain aloofness about both of 
 them, yet to the artist they hold more gifts than do 
 the other poets we have been considering. The third 
 stage is still in its infancy. It will be a long time 
 before its possibilities are exhausted. 
 
 Of course, to say that a poet is a lyric and not a 
 dramatic poet, is in no sense an adverse criticism. 
 For most people, lyric poetry is the truest sort of 
 poetry. It is, however, interesting to note, that the 
 other four poets of this volume are mainly narrative 
 and dramatic poets. I have called Mr. Masters' 
 work epic, and so it is ; an epic compounded of short, 
 incisive dramas. I have shown Mr. Sandburg as a 
 lyrist partly obscured by a propagandist, but he, 
 also, is often intensely dramatic. In the work of the 
 Imagists, we find romantic lyricism, and this, and 
 their approach to their art, is their contribution to 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 333 
 
 the time. And it is necessary to remember that 
 Mr. Fletcher, while in no sense either narrative or 
 dramatic, is occasionally epic, as we have seen. 
 The real point to be noted of both his work and that 
 of "H.D." is not that they are lyrists, but that 
 their lyricism is so seldom a record of the reactions 
 of one personaUty upon another. Nature needed 
 to be affirmed, and they affirm it; it will be for 
 other poets once more to knit man into nature 
 in a changed relation, and that is primarily the 
 road along which the movement would seem to be 
 travelling. 
 
 Some time ago, I spoke of Mr. Fletcher as being 
 peculiarly sensitive to the nuances of tongues. He 
 is a veritable mirror of the atmosphere of peoples, 
 periods, and places. Language is more than lan- 
 guage ; it is the key by which we enter the race-soul. 
 To this poet, the race-soul can be read, not only in 
 books, but in the running brooks as well. He de- 
 duces a race-consciousness from his reading, but he 
 deduces it from his observation also. No man can 
 construct a personality from a landscape better than 
 can Mr. Fletcher. 
 
 I do not know if Mr. Fletcher reads Spanish. I 
 do not know whether he is familiar with Mexican or 
 South American literature. It may well be so, for 
 he is an omnivorous reader. But certain it is, that, 
 in his Arizona poems, we have the whole spirit of 
 Colonial Spain : 
 
334 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 MEXICAN QUARTER 
 
 By an alley lined with tumble-down shacks 
 
 And street-lamps askew, haK-sputtering, 
 
 Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth and dogs 
 
 Scratching their mangy backs : 
 
 Half -naked children are running about, 
 
 Women puff cigarettes in black doorways, 
 
 Crickets are crjring. 
 
 Men slouch sullenly 
 
 Into the shadows : 
 
 Behind a hedge of cactus, 
 
 The smell of a dead horse 
 
 Mingles with the smell of tamales fr3ang. 
 
 And a girl in a black lace shawl 
 
 Sits in a rickety chair by the square of an unglazed window, 
 And sees the explosion of the stars 
 Softly posed on a velvet sky. 
 And she is humming to herself : — 
 "Stars, if I could reach you, 
 (You are so very clear that it seems as if I could reach you) 
 I would give you all to Madonna's image. 
 On the grey-plastered altar behind the paper flowers. 
 So that Juan would come back to me, 
 And we could live again those lazy burning hours 
 Forgetting the tap of my fan and my sharp words. 
 And I would only keep four of you. 
 Those two blue-white ones overhead, 
 To hang in my ears ; 
 And those two orange ones yonder. 
 To fasten on my shoe buckles." 
 
"H.D:' and John Could Fletcher 335 
 
 A little further along the street 
 A man sits stringing a brown guitar. 
 The smoke of his cigarette curls round his head, 
 And he, too, is humming, but other words : 
 "Think not that at your window I wait ; 
 New love is better, the old is turned to hate. 
 Fate ! Fate ! All things pass away ; 
 Life is forever, youth is for a day. 
 Love again if you may 
 Before the stars are blown out of the sky 
 And the crickets die ; 
 Babylon and Samarkand 
 Are mud walls in a waste of sand." 
 
 I have heard it objected in connection with this 
 poem that tamales are never fried. And, as a matter 
 of fact, that is, of course, so. Mr. Fletcher is often 
 inexcusably careless about such details. But in 
 spite of this unimportant trifle, is not the soul of 
 Spain in that poem, the Spain of a debased and 
 deserted colony ? 
 
 Here is another of these Arizona poems, and now 
 we have the atmosphere of an old, past civilization 
 engulfed in a new, wild land. 
 
 RAIN IN THE DESERT 
 
 The huge red-buttressed mesa over yonder 
 
 Is merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning 
 
 Its altar-fires of pinyon and of toyon for the day. 
 
336 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 The old priests sleep, white-shrouded, 
 
 Their pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely 
 
 feathered ; 
 On every mummied face there glows a smile. 
 
 The sun is rolling slowly 
 
 Beneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents, 
 
 Coiling, uncoiling, blue-black, sparked with fires. 
 
 The old dead priests 
 
 Feel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them, 
 
 Above the smell of scorching oozing pinyon, 
 
 The acrid smell of rain. 
 
 And now the showers 
 
 Surround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers : 
 Shaking their rattles, stamping, chanting, roaring, 
 Whirling, extinguishing the last red wisp of light. 
 
 Suggestion is beautifully managed in that poem. 
 The desert is scarcely mentioned, and yet the whole 
 is hot and arid with the smell of scorched earth. 
 Notice the contrast between the stillness of the be- 
 ginning and the movement of the end, an end of 
 clatter, but under which there remains always, silent 
 and imperishable, the recollection of a pre-historic 
 civilization. 
 
 Now let us turn to Mr. Fletcher's latest volume, 
 "Japanese Prints," shortly to be issued by The Four 
 Seas Company, Boston. In the preface to this 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 337 
 
 book, Mr. Fletcher analyzes the Japanese tanka 
 and hokku forms, and sketches lightly the history of 
 Japanese prosody, and then analyzes that chief 
 quality of all Japanese verse — psychological sug- 
 gestion. The modern poets are becoming more and 
 more indebted to the Japanese for a realization of the 
 value of this effect. To quote a moment from 
 Mr. Fletcher's preface : 
 
 Let us take an example. The most famous hokku that Basho 
 wrote, might be literally translated thus : 
 
 An old pond /.And the sound of a frog leaping / Into the 
 water. 
 
 This means nothing to the Western mind. But to the 
 Japanese it means aU the beauty of such a life of retirement 
 and contemplation as Basho practised. If we permit our minds 
 to supply the detail Basho deHberately omitted, we see the 
 mouldering temple enclosure, the sage himself in meditation, 
 the ancient piece of water, and the sound of a frog's leap — pass- 
 ing vanity — slipping into the silence of eternity. The poem has 
 three meanings. First, it is a statement of fact. Second, it is 
 an emotion deduced from that. Third, it is a sort of spiritual 
 allegory. And all this Basho has given us in his seventeen 
 syllables. 
 
 It is perhaps hardly necessary to state here that 
 Japanese prosody is based upon alternate lines of 
 five and seven syllables. The tanka is a poem of 
 thirty-one syllables arranged as follows : 5, 7, 5, 7, 7- 
 The hokku is a truncated tanka in which the last 
 
338 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 two lines are suppressed ; it consists, therefore, of 
 seventeen syllables : 5, 7, 5. Mr. Fletcher explains 
 the peculiar adaptability of the hokku to suggestion 
 in this manner : . 
 
 It must always be understood that there is an implied con- 
 tinuation to every Japanese hokku. The concluding hemistich, 
 whereby the hokku becomes the tanka, is existent in the writer's 
 mind, but never uttered. 
 
 Understanding very well the method by which the 
 Japanese obtained these effects, he nevertheless 
 realizes that a purely syllabic form is not well adapted 
 to a highly accented language such as English. It 
 should be said also that Japanese words, being capa- 
 ble of more than one construction, make it possible 
 to convey more than one meaning by a single word. 
 This leads to a sort of serious punning, and by these 
 double meemings a poem of seventeen syllables can 
 be made to contain many more. Mr. Fletcher says : 
 "Good hokkus cannot be written in English. The 
 thing we have to follow is not a form, but a spirit." 
 Speaking of the volume itself, he adds: "As for the 
 poems themselves, they are not Japanese at all, but 
 all illustrate something of the charm I have found in 
 Japanese poetry and art." 
 
 Mr. Fletcher is right in saying that these poems 
 are not written absolutely in the Japanese idiom, 
 but still they have a distinct perfume of Japan about 
 them, and once again prove the poet's sensitiveness 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 339 
 
 to atmosphere. This, to an occidental mind, has 
 certainly the charm of Japan : 
 
 THE YOUNG DAIMYO 
 
 When he first came out to meet me, 
 
 He had just been girt with the two swords ; 
 
 And I found he was far more interested in the glitter of their 
 
 hilts 
 And did not even compare my kiss to a cherry-blossom. 
 
 Another, the most beautiful in the volume, is, if 
 not specifically Japanese, full of Oriental splendour : 
 
 YOSHIWARA FESTIVAL 
 
 The green and violet peacocks 
 
 With golden tails 
 
 Parade. 
 
 Beneath the fluttering jangling streamers 
 They walk 
 Violet and gold. 
 
 The green and violet peacocks 
 
 Through the golden dusk 
 
 Showered upon them from the vine-hung lanterns, 
 
 Stately, nostalgically. 
 
 Parade. 
 
 Not the least interesting quality of that poem is its 
 
340 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 stately rhythm, moving slowly, itself "parading," 
 with the Oirans whom it portrays. 
 
 Sometimes the poet's conception is more Chinese 
 than Japanese : 
 
 AN OIRAN AND HER KAMUSO 
 
 Gilded hummingbirds are whizzing 
 Through the palace garden, 
 Deceived by the jade petals 
 Of the Emperor's jewel-trees. 
 
 That is almost distinctly Chinese. "Yoshiwara 
 Festival" was neither the one nor the other, but 
 elusively both. The difference is not hard to dis- 
 tinguish, once one has learnt to understand the 
 psychology of the two nations, to feel the subtle 
 divergencies of their literary practice. 
 
 Where these poems sometimes fail is exactly in 
 this matter of feeling. Mr. Fletcher loses sight of 
 the fact that only the most simple language, the 
 clearest image, is in keeping with the hokku form. 
 The poem must be of the most limpid clarity to gain 
 the full effect of the underlying suggestion. It is the 
 contrast which gives the hokku its piquancy. So, 
 when Mr. Fletcher writes: 
 
 LOVERS EMBRACING 
 
 Force and 3rielding meet together 
 An attack is half repulsed : 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 341 
 
 Shafts of broken sunlight dissolving 
 Convolutions of torpid cloud. 
 
 he sacrifices the peculiar Japanese atmosphere. 
 That poem is in Mr. Fletcher's most personal idiom, 
 but it is not in the least in the idiom of Japan. 
 From this point of view, the most successful poem in 
 the book is 
 
 MOODS 
 
 A poet's moods : 
 
 Fluttering butterflies in the rain. 
 
 That is at once Mr. Fletcher and Japan. It is 
 brief and clear, and the suggestion never becomes 
 statement, but floats, a nimbus, over the short, 
 sharp lines. 
 
 Chief among Mr. Fletcher's contributions to 
 "Some Imagist Poets, 1917 ," which included three 
 excellent lyrics, "Blackberry Harvest," "Moon- 
 light," and "Dawn," and one interesting war poem, 
 "Armies," was the "Lincoln" I have already quoted. 
 And we may leave it as the evidence of the deepening 
 and broadening of his art. It is an earnest of the 
 future, and, crushing as the war seems now, hard and 
 bitter the weight it imposes upon the brains and 
 hearts of men, it is in such poems as these that we 
 feel the renewing power of art, rising even upon the 
 wings of despair. Mr. Fletcher has needed just this 
 violent concussion between imagination and fact. 
 
e 
 
 342 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 Without it, he would always have been an extraor- 
 dinarily original and suggestive poet; with it, he 
 may well become a great one. Mr. Fletcher is a 
 virtuoso of words, and sometimes this faculty runs 
 away with him. Some of his symphonies, some of 
 the poems in "Irradiations," are heaped too full of 
 words, the changes he rings are too heavy, he con- 
 fuses too many colours, too many sounds. His 
 enormous fecundity is responsible for this. It is 
 hard for him to curb his exuberance. Nature has 
 given him much, and it is difficult for him to put 
 himself to school. His books would gain by being 
 pruned ; but, as I said in the beginning, he lacks the 
 selective instinct. It is largely for this reason that 
 he is not yet esteemed as he should be. But, for the 
 discerning eye, no living poet has more distinction of 
 vision or of style. In him, indeed, we see the 
 beginning of that new order of which I have so often 
 spoken. To the poet, he is a real teacher, indicating 
 new directions, opening up untrodden ways of 
 thought. 
 
 Throughout the pages of this book, I have tried 
 to point out that, in speaking of a "new movement," 
 we do not speak idly; that there is a new spirit 
 permeating the work of American poets. Each of 
 the poets of whom I have been speaking represents 
 a tendency, which is in no way altered by their posi- 
 tion in one or the other stages of the advance. 
 Among them, they represent, all -the-teends in evi- 
 
"H.D." and John Gould Fletcher 343 
 
 dence in modern verse. Which of them will most 
 influence the future, it is impossible now to say. 
 But, different as each is from the others, together 
 they constitute a marching order, from the old into 
 the new. They are the proof of the re-creative 
 energy of the poetic impulse, which, always changing, 
 is nevertheless a permanent possession of the human 
 race. 
 
 Professor Dowden, in an article on Heinrich Heine 
 in his "Essays — Modem and Elizabethan," says: 
 "He swam with the current of romantic art, and he 
 headed round and swam more vigorously against the 
 current, so anticipating the movement of realism 
 which was to meet and turn the tide ; but Heine's 
 ideal of art, at once realistic and romantic, is still 
 unattained." 
 
 This was written in 1910, and already in 1917 we 
 see this ideal, expressed in terms quite other than 
 those of Heine, well on the road to attainment. "At 
 once realistic and romantic," this would seem to be 
 the goal toward which the New Movement in 
 Modern American Poetry is aiming. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 
 
 The Children of the Night. Charles Scribner's Sons, New 
 
 York, 1897. 
 Captain Craig. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1902; 
 
 reprint, with new poems. The Macmillan Company, New 
 
 York, 1915. 
 The Town Down the River. Charles Scribner's Sons, New 
 
 York, 1910. 
 Van Zorn. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1914. 
 The Porcupine. The Macmillan Company, New York, 191 5. 
 The Man Against the Sky. The Macmillan Company, New 
 
 York, 1916. 
 Merlin. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1917. 
 
 ROBERT FROST 
 
 A Bov's Will. David Nutt and Company, London, 1913; 
 
 Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1915. 
 North of Boston. David Nutt and Company, London, 1914; 
 
 Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1915. 
 Mountain Interval. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 
 
 1916. 
 
 347 
 
348 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry 
 
 EDGAR LEE MASTERS 
 
 A Book of Verses. Way and Williams, Chicago, 1898. 
 
 Maximilian. (A play inverse.) Richard G. Badger, Boston, 1902. 
 
 The New Star Chamber aito Other Essays. The Hammers- 
 mark Publishing Company, Chicago, 1904. 
 
 The Blood of the Prophets. (Under 'pseudon3rm : Dexter 
 Wallace.) The Hammersmark Publishing Company, Chi- 
 cago, 1905. 
 
 The Spoon River Anthology. The Macmillan Company, 
 New York, 1915. 
 
 Songs and Satires. The Macmillan Company, New York, 
 1916. 
 
 The Great Valley. The Macmillan Company, New York, 
 1916. 
 
 CARL SANDBURG 
 CHICAGO' Poems. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1916. 
 
 "H.D." 
 
 Sea Garden. Constable and Company, London ; and Hough- 
 ton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1916. 
 In collaboration : 
 Des Imagistes. Albert and Charles Boni, New York, 1914. 
 Some Imagist Poets. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston ; 
 
 and Constable and Company, London, 1915. 
 Some Imagist Poets, 1916 . Houghton Mifflin Company, 
 
 Boston ; and Constable and Company, London, 1916. 
 Some Imagist Poets, 1917 . Houghton Mifflin Company, 
 
 Boston; and Constable and Company, London, 1917. 
 
Bibliography 349 
 
 JOHN GOULD FLETCHER 
 
 Fire and Wine. Grant Richards, Ltd., London, 1913. 
 
 Fool's Gold. Max Goschen, London, 1913. 
 
 The Dominant City. Max Goschen, London, 1913. 
 
 The Book of Nature. Constable and Company, London, 
 
 1913- 
 Visions of the Evening. Erskine McDonald, London, 1913. 
 Irradiations : Sand and Spray. Houghton Mifflin Company, 
 Boston, 1915 ; and Constable and Company, London, 1915. 
 Goblins and Pagodas. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 
 1916. 
 In collaboration : 
 Des Imagistes. Albert and Charles Boni, New York, 1914. 
 Some Imagist Poets. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston ; 
 
 and Constable and Company, London, 1915. 
 Some Imagist Poets, 1916 . Houghton MifiBin Company, 
 Boston; and Constable and Company, London, 1916. 
 Some Imagist Poets, 1917 . Houghton Mifflin Company, 
 Boston; and Constable and Company, London, 19 17. 
 
 Pnntea m tbe united btates ot Amenca. 
 
T 
 
 HE following pages contain advertisements of 
 a few of the new Macmillan novels. 
 
Six French Poets 
 
 STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
 By amy LOWELL 
 
 New revised edition , illustrated, $2.50 
 
 A brilliant series of biographical and critical' essays dealing with Emile Ver- 
 haeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Regnier, Francis Jammes, 
 and Paul Fort, by one of the foremost living American poets. It is the first 
 book in English containing a careful and minute study of the famous writers of 
 one of the greatest epochs of French poetry. The translations make up an 
 important part of the book, and together with the French originals constitute a 
 representative anthology of the poetry of the period. 
 
 William Lyon Phelps, Professor of English Literature, Yale University, 
 says: 
 
 " This is, I think, the most valuable work on contemporary French literature 
 that I have seen for a long time. It is written by one who has a thorough 
 knowledge of the subject and who is herself an American poet of distinction. 
 She has the knowledge, the S3mipathy, the penetration, and the insight — all 
 necessary to make a notable book of criticism. It is a, work that should be 
 widely read in America." 
 
 " I can conceive of no greater pleasure than that of a lover of poetry who 
 reads in Miss Lowell's book about modern French poetry for the first time : it 
 must be like falling into El Dorado." — F. S. FLINT, formerly French critic of 
 Poetry and Drama, London, in The Little Review. 
 
 "... A thoughtful, comprehensive, and most valuable contt'ibution to mod- 
 em criticism and appreciation." — New York Tribune. 
 
 " Amy Lowell's ' French Poets ' . . . ought to be labelled like Pater's studies 
 ' Appreciations,' so full of charm are its penetrative interpretations . . . and it 
 is not too bold to say that her introductions to and interpretations of French 
 poets will live as long as interest in these poets themselves lives. Her book is 
 a living and lasting piece of criticism ... a masterly volume." — New York 
 Sun. 
 
 " A very admirable piece of work." — Tke London Bookman. 
 
 "Une tr6s interessante 6tude." — La France. 
 
 "An excellent book." — ■Emile Cammaerts in The Athen(Bur,t — London. 
 
 " Miss Lowell has done a real service to literature. One must be limited, 
 indeed, who fails to appreciate the power of these writers as set forth through 
 the comment, the discriminating extracts, and the appended prose translations 
 in her book." — North American Review. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
Men, Women, and Ghosts 
 
 By amy LOWELL 
 
 New Third Edition, cloth, izmo, $i.2j 
 Leather, izmo, $i,6o 
 
 ". . . In the poem which gave its name to a previous volume, ' Sword 
 Blades and Poppy Seed,' Miss Lowell uttered her Credo with rare sincerity 
 and passion. Not since Elizabeth Barrett's ' Vision of Poets ' has there 
 been such a confession of faith in the mission of poetry, such a stern com- 
 pulsion of dedication laid upon the poet. And in her latest work we find 
 proof that she has lived according to her confession and her dedication 
 with a singleness of purpose seldom encountered in our fluid time. 
 
 " ' Men, Women, and Ghosts ' is a book greatly and strenuously imag- 
 ined. . . . Miss Lowell is a great romantic. . . She belongs to the 
 few who, in every generation, feel that poetry is a high calling, and who 
 press undeviatingly toward the mark. They are few, and they are fre- 
 quently lonely, but they lead." — New York Times Book Review. 
 
 ". . . 'The Hammers' is a really thrilling piece of work; the skill 
 with which it is divided into different moods and motifs is something more 
 than a tour de force. The way the different hammers are characterized 
 and given voice, the varying music wrung from them (from the ponderous 
 banging of the hammers at the building of the ' Bellerophon ' to their light 
 tapping as they pick off the letters of Napoleon's victories on the arch of 
 the Place du Carrousell), the emphasis vrith which they reveal a whole 
 period — these are the things one sees rarely." — Louis Untermeyek in 
 the Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 ". . . Beautiful . . . poetry as authentic as any we know. It is indi- 
 vidual, innocent of echo and imitation, with the uniqueness that comes of 
 personal genius. . . . Miss Lowell strives to get into words the effects 
 of the painter's palette and the «nusician's score. And life withal. Does 
 she succeed ? I should say she does, and the first poem in this book, 
 ' Patterns,' is a brilliant, aesthetic achievement in a combination of story, 
 imagism, and symbolism. ' Men, Women, and Ghosts ' is a volume that 
 contains beautiful poetry for all readers who have the root of the matter 
 in them." — Eeedy's Mirror, St. Louis. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 PublisherB 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
Men, Women, and Ghosts 
 
 By amy LOWELL 
 
 Third Edition, cloth, i2mo,$i.2^ 
 Leather, i2tno, $i.6o 
 
 "... 'Figurines in Old Saxe,' a work of sheer power as well as 
 of beauty. . . . Then there are eight poems intended to illustrate 
 some phases of the Napoleonic regime and that are startling in their 
 clairvoyance. . . . Miss Lowell has the power that ought to be the 
 chief aim of all poets, to look straight at the commonplace and to 
 reveal the mystery of it, to show that there is a mystery, and that 
 without the poet's aid the less favoured among us can see nothing 
 but surfaces and the obvious." — San Francisco Argonaut. 
 
 "... She has done the world imperishable service ; she has 
 cleaned out our old bottles and left them pure, sweet, and welcom- 
 ing for new wine." — The Nation, New York. 
 
 " . . . ' Patterns,' the poem with which the book opens, is a 
 superb vignette of the eternal tragedy of the woman left at home." 
 
 — The Independent, New York. 
 
 " The series of rural dramas in irregular, unrhymed verse, entitled 
 'The Overgrown Pasture,' are gems of their kind." — Pall Mall 
 Gazette, London. 
 
 " The most original of all the young American writers of to-day.'' 
 
 — The New Age, London. 
 
 " ' In Men, Women, and Ghosts,' Amy Lowell supplies those very 
 factors of fresh, sensuous imagery and emotional zest of which we 
 note the comparative absence in American poetry of the previous 
 decade. Miss Lowell has undoubtedly reenforced her agile, aesthetic 
 instinct by a craftsman's care. Her choice of subjects and her way 
 of approach show a culture truly cosmopolitan. . . . Brilliant is 
 the term for ' Men, Women, and Ghosts ' — praise which holds good 
 when the book is put to the test of a third reading." — Edward 
 Garnett in The Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64^66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed 
 
 By amy LOWELL 
 
 Third edition, doth, $1.2; 
 Leather, $1.60 
 
 OPimONS OF LEADING REVIEWERS 
 
 " Against the multitudinous array of daily verse our times produce 
 this volume utters itself with a range and brilliancy wholly remark- 
 able. I cannot see that Miss Lowell's use of unrhymed vers libre 
 has been surpassed in English. Read 'The Captured Goddess,' 
 ' Music ' and ' The Precinct. Rochester,' a piece of mastercraft in 
 this kind. A wealth of subtleties and sympathies, gorgeously 
 wrought, full of macabre eifects (as many of the poems are) and 
 brilliantly worked out. The things of splendor she has made she 
 will hardly outdo in their kind." — Josephine Preston Peabody, 
 The Boston Herald. 
 
 "For quaint pictorial exactitude and bizarrerie of color these 
 poems remind one of Flemish masters and Dutch tulip gardens ; 
 again, they are fine and fantastic, like Venetian glass ; and they are 
 all curiously flooded with the moonlight of dreams. . . . Miss 
 Lowell has a remarkable gift of what one might call the dramatic- 
 decorative. Her decorative imagery is intensely dramatic, and her 
 dramatic pictures are in themselves vivid and fantastic decorations." 
 — Richard Le Gallienne, New York Times Book Review. 
 
 " Such poems as ' A Lady,' ' Music,' ' White and Green,' are well- 
 nigh flawless in their beauty — perfect 'images.'" — Harriet 
 Monroe, Poetry. 
 
 " Her most notable quality appears in the opening passage of the 
 volume. The sharply etched tones and contours of this picture are 
 characteristic of the author's work. ... In ' unrhymed cadence ' 
 Miss Lowell's cadences are sometimes extremely delicate, as in ' The 
 Captured Goddess.' " — Arthur Davison Ficke, Chicago Dial. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass 
 By amy LOWELL 
 
 Third edition, cloth, $1.25 
 Leather, $1.60 
 
 PRESS NOTICES 
 
 " These poems arouse interest, and justify it by the result. Miss Lowell 
 is the sister of President Lowell of Harvard. Her art, however, needs no 
 reflection from such distinguished influence to make apparent its distinc- 
 tion. Such verse as this is delightful, has a sort of personal flavour, a 
 loyalty to the fundamentals of life and nationality. . . . The child poems 
 are particularly graceful." — Boston Evening Transcript, Boston, Mass. 
 
 " Miss Lowell has given expression in exquisite form to many beautiful 
 thoughts, inspired, by a variety of subjects and based on some of the lofti- 
 est ideals. . . . 
 
 " The verses are grouped under the captions ' Lyrical Poems,' ' Sonnets,' 
 and ' Verses for Children.' . . . 
 
 " It is difficult to say which of these are the most successful. Indeed, 
 all reveal Miss Lowell's powers of observation from the view-point of a 
 lover of nature. Moreover, Miss Lowell writes with a gentle philosophy 
 and a deep knowledge of humanity. . . . 
 
 " The sonnets are especially appealing and touch the heart strings so 
 tenderly that there comes immediate response in the same spirit. . . . 
 
 "That she knows the workings of the juvenile mind is plainly indicated 
 by her verses written for their reading." — Boston Sunday Globe, Boston, 
 Mass. 
 
 " A quite delightful little collection of verses." — Toronto Globe, Toronto, 
 Canada. 
 
 "The Lyrics are true to the old definition; they would sing well to the 
 accompaniment of the strings. We should like to hear ' Hora Stellatrix ' 
 rendered by an artist." — Hartford Courani, Hartford, Conn. 
 
 " Verses that show delicate appreciation of the beautiful, and imagina- 
 tive quality. A sonnet entitled ' Dreams ' is peculiarly full of sympathy 
 and feeling." — The Sun, Baltimore, Md. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Fuhliahers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New Tork 
 
"'' '^^^iH, y^ist