Critical Notes on American Poets

ON opening a little volume, Poems and Lyrics,¹ by George Reston Malloch, one recognizes that our young English poets inherit advantages denied their American brothers. The English literary soil has been fructified by the germs of poetic associations since the days of Chaucer. Indeed, not only were the Elizabethans inspired by the riches of the mediæval world and the Renaissance, but elements of the rich compost of the buried civilizations carried into Britain by the invading Celts, Romans, and Teutonic tribes reappear in the literary magic of the Shakespearean drama. Macbeth and King Lear are the poetic fruit of cycles of legends. And to read our contemporary poets — Hardy, Doughty, Bridges, Yeats, Davies, Flecker, de la Mare, Hodgson, Sturge Moore, Lawrence, and the rest — is to recognize that in their literary blood courses sap from these ancient English roots ramifying in our literary soil.

Mr. Malloch’s verses are no better, line for line, than most of the poems in The Little Book of Modern [American] Verse,² edited by Miss Rittenhouse; but one feels that many of the latter suffer from a thinness of literary humus. The effect of the majority of these American poets of a decade ago, as also that of the Transition poets of the sixties, — Stedman, Aldrich, — and of their successors, Gilder, Cawein, and the others, refined, sensitive, and conscientious as is their work, is too much that of a literary dessert, and too little that of the meat or the wine, the labor or the joy of life. Such work is an ornamentation, like the cut flowers on the table. One feels that Miss Rittenhouse’s seventy poets have not so much created their own styles as selected them from imported English stock; and that when they mix in their native images, the effect is incongruous, as in the poem ‘Lincoln’ by Edwin Markham, where the moral grandiloquence flowers in rhetoric:—

It is surely the borrowed or adulterated literary styles of the vast majority of American poets contemporary with Whitman, that have proved fatal to their claims in the eyes of this generation? It is therefore with curiosity that we turn to the ‘New Poetry,’ to the renaissance of poetry in America of which Mr. W. S. Braithwaite is a careful sponsor. His Index of Poets, of Magazine Poems and of Volumes of Poetry published in America in 1916, is so imposing as to abash a foreign critic who feels that in offering, here, a few remarks, he necessarily remains in ignorance of verse of rarer quality than he has been privileged to examine. But the main conclusion that he draws from Mr. Braithwaite’s Annual is that American poetry is in a vigorous state. Not only is the growth of the vine luxuriant, but there is plenty of body in the new, fermenting wine; though of fine bouquet, of high distinction of style, there is, as yet, not much evidence.

One must not ask too much at once. The main thing is that the poets should be fortified by public interest in the movement, and that the standard of critical taste should be raised. From a few magazine articles here and there one gathers that the reviewers are a little too busy confounding the geese with the swans, and the coteries too intent on crowning their own friends with laurels. With the spirit and aims of the innovators in vers libre one must declare one’s self in sympathy. The old metrical forms cannot suffice the new impulses, and there must be continuous experiment, if a disastrous crystallization of form is not to fetter the poets, as the bardic poets of Ireland were fettered by their elaborate school-craft for many centuries. But bad taste is sure to parade in its pretentious papier-mâcheé mask.

Mr. Ezra Pound’s Personae,³ for instance, is a specimen of false poetic mosaic — pseudo-mediæval tesseræ: set in sticky, modern cement that can never harden. Such stand condemned as style, by their adulterate jargon. Some reviewers have commended Mr. Pound’s ‘freshness of inspiration,’ his ‘immense vitality and passion’; but these are precisely the qualities nature has denied him. His Canzoni⁴ may offer us technical feats, but are they not bankrupt in feeling? Everything in Mr. Pound’s verse appears to us to be derived, or imitated, or cut out of old patterns. One is told, however, that he is at his best in translations from the Chinese.

Mr. Untermeyer, on the other hand, is rich in feeling but poor in artistry. Many of his pieces in These Times,⁵ as ‘The Swimmers,’ ‘On the Palisade,’ ‘A Side Street,’ one reads with sympathy, applauding the truth and unconventional vigor of his sensations and impressions; but even when most successful he needs to concentrate and purify his verse and eliminate the dross from his metal. In ‘ Thirteen Portraits,’ by his force of feeling he gets home on his human target with a satiric sabreedge, and in ‘Lovers’ he has retold the old story of Love’s satiety in a manner all his own. His ideas are bold, but he is too apt to philosophize and divagate, and mar his pictures with hasty, random strokes and coarse metaphors, as in his poem ‘To a Weeping Willow,’ where he speaks thus of the storm wind, —

Mr. Untermeyer shouts over-loudly of his unconquerable optimism, of his unquenchable faith in life. Is this a genuine temperamental trait? or is it that he needs must echo the popular American creed, and its ‘red-blood’ gospel? Walt Whitman shouted, too, but his giant lungs could carry over prairie and savannah to far continents. But is not Mr. Untermeyer shouting at the crowd from his literary window? In ‘The Poet’ he describes aptly enough the qualifications of the true poet, concluding, —

A fine illustration of the truth of the above stanza is offered us in a little booklet, Chinese Poems;'⁶ and from a score of exquisite little cameos I select one by a poet of the Pre-T’ang period, to compare with Mr. Untermeyer’s method: —

From Mr. Untermeyer’s ‘Truce,’ a description, in seventy lines, of two lovers clinging together in the dusk of a winter’s evening while watching from a city window the falling snow, we take the following lines: —

Note how the cheap, sentimental images that we have italicized clash and jar. Whereas the Pre-T’ang poet’s picture, by its simple veracity of feeling, will endure to the end, Mr. Untermeyer, by smothering the essentials and emphasizing what is superfluous, has so weighed down his craft with heavy stocks and stones, that it has already sunk to the bottom of ‘Time’s Stream.’ Thus the ‘New Poetry,’ however ‘progressive’ its practitioners may claim to be, is not necessarily an advance on the art of sixty generations back!

The test for American poetry to-day is, of course, simply the old twofold test — how does your vision enrich our consciousness of man’s life and nature’s life? and what original effects of force and beauty in language does it communicate? When one turns to Mr. Edward Lee Masters’s The Great Valley⁷ one asks one’s self, does one read it solely for the psychological interest of its human drama? Not entirely. For his poems, ‘Gobineau to Tree, ‘Autochthon,’ ‘Hanging the Picture,’ ‘Lincoln and Douglas Debates,’ highly original in their psychological insight, are more native, more individual in style, than Mr. Markham’s ‘Lincoln,’ quoted above. But still, is not Mr. Masters growing in danger of becoming a little too fluent, too careless? In his Spoon River Anthology he struck out a form of psychological epitaph which, in grim terseness and pregnant irony of phrasing, rises superior to much bald atmosphere and ugliness. What did his vision accomplish for us? His acute insight cut through the dead flesh of sham morality and conventional ideals, probing the living impulses and hidden passions of a typical community of citizens. He pierced the joints of the armored mail of Pharisaism with its incrusted materialism, greed, self-complacency; and he cast the tragi-comedy of the life-stories of hundreds of men and women in the bronze of his psychological epitaphs. This was a great achievement, and his exposure of the ironical shams of life, flaunting in the headlines and glozed by the tombstones, will live in Spoon River Anthology, not only by his faith in truth and all that is humanly fine, but by the force of his caustic, naked phraseology.

The same insight, the same sane, generous humanity inspires The Great Valley, indeed in widening circles of vision; but the form, more prolix in narrative and reflection, has not the same finality. ‘The passion and color and grave music’ which Mr. W. M. Reedy finds in it — do they find worthy form? Read ‘Cato Braden,’ an admirable sketch of a life’s failure, and count how many of the lines are tedious, unnecessary. For example, —

Not a line of these eleven is worth preserving. Read the hundred lines of ‘Steam-Shovel Art,’ a conte to please any lawyer; or the hundred and thirty lines of‘New Year’s Day,’ and consider whether these narratives would not be far more effective in prose. The psychological analysis in ‘The Typical American’ is as piercing as ever, but the art is too didactic, the metaphors too unchastened, for the piece to rank as fine poetry. And ’The Last Confession,’ ‘Marsyas,’ ‘The Desplaines Forest,’ ‘Apollo at Phera’; ‘The Apology of Demetrius,’ ‘The Radical’s Message,’ and various other pieces, fall to a plane that lies between poetry and prose. Grateful as one is for The Great Valley, for the wit and truth of its varied human drama, one feels that the form, generally, is scarcely worthy of the author’s penetrating spiritual vision.

Has not the delicate voice of Mr. Frost’s muse lost something of its timbre in Mountain Interval ?⁸ Every one knows that in a stretch of country there are certain fields, woods, meadows, which subtly allure one to return again and again to them in preference to others. The contours of the ground, the way trees break the sky-line, the shape of a field, the curve of a road or a lane, are elating or comforting, whereas neighboring fields and copses seem uninspiring in comparison. Well, Mountain Interval, this stretch of new country, leaves me comparatively unresponsive. Is there not some flatness in the cadence of the rhythms, in the character of the verse; and less of — well, one must use the old word — beauty in spirit or in mood? It occurs to one that possibly Mr. Frost has evolved a new theory of verse, or, perhaps, that he has wed his old practice to some new method. Does he hold that one subject is as desirable, one word as beautiful, as another? But Mountain Interval shows that they are not. Though there are interesting poems in the book, as ‘Snow,’ ‘Hyla Brook,’

‘ The Line Gang,’ this admirer of North of Boston feels as though a gray sky had, there, succeeded the soft light and rolling clouds of a southwest wind. But nothing is so inconstant as weather: it breaks, and sun, wind, and sky will restore speedily the charm of Mr. Frost’s landscape.

In Men, Women and Ghosts,⁹ 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 reinforced her agile, æsthetic instinct by a craftsman’s care. Her choice of subjects and her way of approach show a culture truly cosmopolitan. There is little that she cannot do in the genres she has chosen, when she puts her mind to it. Has she not drawn admirable inspiration from Keats in ‘Pickthorn Manor,’ and from Byron in ‘The Cremona Violin’? Note how near, both in spirit and method, is the clever ‘The Hammers’ to The Ingoldshy Legends. In psychological sureness in ‘The Overgrown Pasture,’ as in ‘Figurines in Old Saxe,’ Miss Lowell’s insight is not to be criticized. She has a light touch, is shrewd and amusing in observation, and is fertile in inventiveness. 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.

Her curious attempt to render the rhythms of music, like Scriabin’s, in verse is indeed no novelty. It has been done long ago, perhaps more successfully, by Spanish poets not of high stature. Where are we to place Miss Amy Lowell? What gives one pause is her very versatility. She recalls a virtuoso whose rendering of Chopin and Scarlatti is equally accomplished. Has she a spiritual atmosphere and temperamental colors of her own? Perhaps we taste her individual quality best in ‘The Dinner Party’ and ‘The Aquarium,’ which open new vistas in the New Poetry, of finer import than does her prose poem ‘Malmaison,’ or her vers libre, ‘The Trumpet-Vine Arbor’ and ‘The City of Falling Leaves.’ Miss Lowell is too clever not to have observed that with each rereading of the three last-mentioned pieces the picture seems to dull, to grow rigid and stereotyped. This must give her pause. For the highest aim of poetry is to indicate the flux, the growth, the mystery of nature by the art of the concrete image. The greater a piece of literary art, the more inexhaustible is it in suggesting the springs and forces of life. The sharp limitation of ‘decorative’ poetry, and of such experiments in ‘polyphonic prose’ as ‘Red Slippers,’ ‘Thompson’s Lunch Room,’ ‘An Opera House,’ and the like, is that, the poet, in striving to convey to us the cunning appearance of things, secures surface at the expense of depth — and the result is æsthetic superficiality.

For this reason such psychological pieces, as ‘The Cremona Violin.’ ‘The Overgrown Pasture,’ and ‘The Dinner Party,’ can be read and reread with pleasure when ‘Malmaison,’ ‘Red Slippers,’ and the rest simply tire us by their almost mechanical rigidity and spiritual poverty. And there is something wrong with an artistic method, surely, that leaves nothing to the imagination. The Chinese masters did not fall into this trap of mere cleverness. Miss Lowell, in her amusing, light, bright ‘A Roxbury Garden’ takes 370 short lines in her effort to give ‘ the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the upand-down elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock’; whereas a Chinese poet, of the Pre-T’ang epoch, concentrates for us a marital drama, communicating both the essence and whole movement of a situation, in seven lines: —

THE EJECTED WIFE

Now here is a model which our Imagists would do very well to study. It follows the laws laid down in Some Imagist Poets : An Anthology,¹⁰ with one important exception, ‘Law 5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.’ ‘The Ejected Wife’ is not hard but soft! soft as growing nature, as the emotion of love. Luckily neither Mr. Aldington, Mr. Flint, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, nor Miss Amy Lowell herself, lives up to this theory of ‘poetry hard and clear.’ How can they? They would forswear the genius of this English language if they did; and, indeed, are not the Imagists apt to go too far in that direction?

Within the limits of his soundings of neurotic impulses and morbid moods, Mr. Conrad Aiken would seem to have succeeded admirably in his aim of weaving strange dream-moods and emotional obsessions into rhythmical patterns of ebb and flow and recurring flux. Psychologically The Jig of Forslin¹¹ is highly interesting. It reproduces with equal dexterity and sincerity, in rich variation, the amoral impulses and desires of adolescence when fevered emotion and thought leap up divorced from moral ‘controls.’ By steeping Forslin’s dream-moods and imaginary actions in the atmosphere of the operatic and music-hall footlights, and passing abruptly from this artificial stimulation of the passions into the hard lights and sinister shadows of night streets and pavements, the author escapes the dicta of the moral censors, which have no jurisdiction in the plane of music, enervating, luring, thrilling, discordant. The verse is subtly rich in tone-effects and in inner rhythms, and Mr. Aiken, accomplished in his artistry, by his sharp critical sense preserves his equilibrium, and does not allow the riot of neurotic impulses to damage his perspective. The Jig of Forslin is indeed an original achievement, one valuable by its creator’s sincerity, though it is impossible to say how much it may appeal to civilizations less artificial than that which has generated it.

No less interesting, indeed more remarkable by its curious experiments in a new technique, is Goblins and Pagodas.¹² Mr. J. G. Fletcher’s practice raises all the most perplexing questions together! Does he attain his ends in his ‘symphonies’ by the ‘spirals’ and subtle musical curves of his vers libre? His is the allusive method, and often one loses the trail and becomes irritated by his vague, windy transitions, by the clouds of colored verbal reflections that he flings lavishly on the page to convey his vibrating sensations and to create his atmosphere. If we wait patiently and watch these verbal rockets soaring and their trailing down, something beautiful will emerge. As an example note how his ‘ Golden Symphony’ hovers and flickers for the first seventy lines, like a lantern-slide that cannot be got fairly on the screen; and lo! a fine, intensely imaginative effect breaks upon us with the line, —

Again, note in ‘The Red Symphony’ how his realistic images of a ship battering her way to port through an icy gale are reinforced and transcended by his recurring sensations of a city, seen on the sky-line, through the stormy sunset, given to the flames. In ‘ Poppies of the Red Year’ Mr. Fletcher’s imagination shows rare creative intensity, in the vision of the European towns and fields, delivered over to devastation and death and war’s anarchy. One must salute such achievements. The criticism however, of the method, generally, is that it is prodigal of eccentricities and too impaired by affectations. Will a future generation style his method self-destructive through lack of concentration, grace, and directness of appeal? It certainly exacts much patient attention from the reader, and here again the best Chinese example is worthy of Mr. Fletcher’s study. His recondite exposition of his technical procedure, which he identifies, on Professor Fenollosa’s authority, with the practice of the poets of the Sung dynasty, need not be taken too seriously.

The charge of adulterated imagery certainly cannot be brought against Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s The Man Against the Sky.¹³ Here we meet a technique accomplished in its ease and certainty, indubitable psychological insight, a sequence of ideas and images that flow with the smoothness of a brimming river — yet withal an effect is produced of a narrative whose implications cannot be grasped in their entirety. Was there not less of mechanism and more of artistic chiseling in Mr. Robinson’s earlier manner? for example, in the poems ‘Lincoln,’ ‘Calverly’s,’ ‘Miniver Cheevy,’ given by Miss Rittenhouse? Though we follow easily enough poems such as ‘Eros Turannos,’ ‘The Unforgiven,’ ‘Bewick Finzer,’ we confess we are puzzled by the intellectualized imagery of The Man Against the Sky. We find no centre in the composition. The fault may lie in our lack of sympathy with the highly intellectual appeal of Mr. Robinson’s poetry, but our criticism, put shortly, is that his thought and imagery fall into over-symmetrical patterns, and that the attention is fatigued thereby, almost as if, indeed, one had been gazing through a kaleidoscope. Has not Mr. Robinson’s polished manner stiffened, unconsciously, into a mannerism that binds too inflexibly his emotion and thought?

The genuineness of Sara Teasdale’s simple lyrics is proved by the fact that we become infected by and share the emotions she communicates in Rivers to the Sea.¹⁴ Her form seems to be born of her feeling. Her phrasing, though marked by no particular individuality, is happily adequate to reflect the light that flashes a woman’s vision of the world, when she gains and loses love.

By the spontaneity of Miss Teasdale’s poetic achievement we may measure the more ambitious appeal of Mr. Neihardt’s The Quest,¹⁵ where both imagery and language are in a sense too ‘literary’ to create a fresh poetic atmosphere. This we think is true even of Mr. Neihardt’s best poems, such as the vigorous ‘Nuptial Song.’

And if we are a little churlish to The Quest, shall we not show ourselves also irresponsive to the indubitable claims of Josephine Preston Peabody’s Harvest Moon?¹⁶ The title poem indeed moves us by its sincerity, and in it and some others, as ‘The Neighbors,’ the authoress tempers her high aspirations for the ‘ Life That Might Be’ with a true vision of the lacerating irony innate in war’s brutal fact. Perhaps the authoress’s song soars a little too high into the poetic ether, in days when the women of fifteen embattled nations have abetted whatever their menchildren have done —the slaying and the slain.

Even in The Poems of Alan Seeger¹⁷ it is, perhaps, less the noble exaltation of such pieces as ‘The Aisne’ and ‘ Champagne, 1914—1916,’ that will give the dead poet his place in American anthologies than the fact that they enshrine the spirit of one who for faith and honor’s sake endured two years of self-imposed hardship and danger on the battlefields of France, 1914-1916.

Lack of space forbids discussion here, of the significant spectacle of many hundreds of ‘new’ poets first finding voice in the actual shock of war. The American reader who desires to follow the contemporary movement in British poetry should procure the Annual of New Poetry.¹⁸ Perhaps the most interesting contributions to this volume are those by Edward Eastaway [Edward Thomas], whose poetic inpulse was stimulated by the example of Robert Frost. Alas! Edward Thomas, whose sensitive Celtic vision of the magic of the English countryside is an abiding example of the riches of our poets’ inheritance, now lies dead on a French battlefield. As a specimen of Thomas’s intense communion with nature, let us quote, for the consideration of American poets, this exquisite little lyric: —

THE SOURCE

All the day the air triumphs with its two voices
Of wind and rain:
As loud as if in anger it rejoices,
Drowning the sound of earth
That gulps and gulps in choked endeavor vain
To swallow the rain.

Half the night too, only the wild air speaks
With wind and rain,
Till forth the dumb source of the river breaks
And drowns the rain and wind;
Bellows like a giant bathing in mighty mirth
The triumph of earth.