The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century

weep of his imagination-sudden contrasts in sound-his prose works-his interest in moving pictures-an apostle of democracy-a wandering minstrel-his vitality-a primary man-art plus morality-his genialit

realism-rural tragedies-centrifugal force-men and women-suspense-the buil

to the most matter-of-fact existence; show people how to think and live and appreciate beauty. What does it matter if some of th

ONIER, Jus

h as prophet and priest than Vachel Lindsay. His poems are notable for originality, pictorial beauty, and thrilling music. He bel

I use it not only in its present, but in its earlie

isten to

feel my l

owerfu

flitting

agreeable, harmonious sound, was

f music. I carried it in my pocket for a year. Nothing since Francis Thompson's In No Strange Land had given me such a spinal chill. Later I learned that it had appeared for the first time in the issue of Poetry for January, 1913. All lovers of verse owe a debt of gratitude to Miss Monroe for br

t year until 1910 he drew strange pictures, lectured on various subjects, and wrote defiant and peculiar "bulletins." At the same time he became a tramp, making long pilgrimages afoot in 1906 through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and in 1908 he invaded in a like manner some of the Northern and Eastern States. These wanderings are described

t about Springfield, to be given to the city in 2018, from a mysterious source. My volume is a hypothetical forecast of the times of 2018, as well as of the Golden Book. Frankly the Lindsay the reviewers know came nearer to existing twelve years ago than today, my manuscripts are so far behind my notes. And a thing that has helped in this is that through changing publishers, etc., my first prose book is called my latest. If you want my ideas in order, assume the writer of the Handy Guide for Beggars is just out of college, of Adventures While Preaching beginning in the thirties

er was written

angeness in the proportion which gives the final touch to beauty; the worst are merely bizarre. He says, "My claim for them is that while laboured and struggling in execution, they represent a study of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Japanese art, two most orthodox origins for art, and have no relation whatever to cubism, post-impress

s rhythmic picnic stage, is recommended to amateurs, its further development to be on their own initiative. Informal parties might divide into groups of dancers and groups of chanters. The whole might be worked out in the spirit in which children play King William was King James's Son, London Bridge.... The main revolution necessar

se Nightingale was given with a full chorus of twelve girls, selected for their speaking voices. From the testimony of one of the professors at the un

lly poem. But whether these games are played by laughing choruses of youth or only by the firelight in the fancy of a solitary reader, the validity of Vachel Lindsay's claim to the title of Poet may be settled at once by wi

cks in a win

kings, with f

led and pounde

on the

rrel with the ha

they w

boom

rella and the h

oomlay, bo

ligion, THEN

n from their re

ONGO, CREEPING T

THE FOREST WIT

ng that

usand

nnibals dan

he boom of the

e beating on a

ryland swun

strel

reams c

palace soa

soming trees to

orches and c

ivory and el

the doorway, as

k princes in thei

brilliant l

hats that we

with their butter

ens with pearls

mmed with the j

ir ankles and li

never heard anything like it before; but do not be afraid of your own enjoyment. Read it aloud a dozen times,

" Yet they remembered him. What would have happened if I had asked them to give me a brief synopsis of the lecture they heard yesterday on "The Message of John Ruskin"? Fear not, lit

o Heaven. But Major Barbara, with its almost appalling cleverness-Granville Barker says the second act is the finest thing Shaw ever composed-is written, after all, from the seat of the scornful, like a metropolitan reporter at a Gospel tent; Mr. Lindsay's poem is written from the inside, from the very

dly with his

d in the blood

gravely and they

in the blood o

rs followed,

oes from the

alleyways and d

sion-ridden, so

saints with m

ons with the

in the blood o

halted by the

ter thro' the

ently with a

dier, while the t

sus. They were

-weeping in th

d in the blood

a common conception of heaven more permanently vivid than in this poem. See how amid the welter of

sies made thei

cal they shriek

icts with that l

aightened, wither

opened on a new

asel-head, the

yls now, and

ires, and of

; for to any one who reads it as we should read all true poetry, with an unconditional surrender to its m

nterpretation of the negro's conception of the devil and of hell as General William Booth is of the Salvation Army's conception of heaven, though it is not so fine a poem. When he rises from hell or descends from heaven, he loves big, boundless things on the face of the earth, l

he town

men with l

they worry

t men, in

twenty

ss glory

a, Nia

town a t

speck at s

e ant-hill

-importan

g twenty

s wings at b

ra, N

retentious melody. After the thunder and the lightning comes the still, small voice. Who ever before thought of comparing the roar of the swiftly passing

iron-horns, ri

uack-horns, sla

road, trillin

ce-horn, here com

narl-horn, brawl

prude-horn, blea

m Kansas, some of

hod-horn, plod-

am-horn, loam-h

m Kansas, some of

the Rac

ated by

a hedge o

and

nal

eet, swee

and

and t

eet, swee

iary, and as universal as youth. His later prose is more careful, possibly more thoughtful, more full of information; but this has a touch of genius. Its successor, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, does not quite recapture the first fine careless rapture. Yet both must be read by students of Mr. Lindsay's verse, not only because they display his personality, but because the original data of many poems can be found among these experiences

he reason, perhaps, is twofold. He is professionally a maker of pictures as well as of chants, and he is an apostle of democracy. The moving picture is the most democratic form of art that the world has ever seen. Maude Adams reaches thousands; Mary Pickf

ot stay for an answer. Fortunately the question was put to a man who answered it by accomplishment; the best answer to any question is not an elaborate theory, but a demonstration. As it is sometimes supposed that Mr. Lindsay's poetry owes its inspiration to Mr. Yeats, it may be well to state here positively that our American owes nothing to the Irishman; his poetry

of the ode from its origin. It is necessary to insist that while the material is new, the method is consciously old. He is no innovator in rim

ting, intoning, are as charming in their way as the stage-directions of J. M. Barrie. They not only show t

cy Grainger a great composer, because of his numerous and delightful audacities. Yet The Congo is a great poem, possessing as it does many of the high qualities of true poetry. It shows a splendid powe

eever appears, it is to call it a music-hall ballad, or to pretend it is not high art; the fact is that the worst memory in the world will retain it. Such a poem comes like a breeze into a close chamber; it is charged with vitality. We are in contact with a new force-a force emanating from that mysterious and inexhaustible stream whence comes every manifestation of genius. To have this super-vitality is to have genius; and although one may have with it many distressing faults of expression and an unlimited supply of bad taste, all oth

o it, and I hope he will accept this challenge. Its awful majesty can be revealed only in verse; for it is one of the very few wonders of the w

first half of the title exhibits his love of resounding harmonies; the second gives an idea of the range of his imagination. His finest work always combines these two elements, melody and elevation, "and sin

ill be. He is a Puritan with a passion for Beauty; he is a zealous reformer filled with Falstaffian mirth; he go

ecame the Man on Horseback, and rode roughshod over every bloom of beauty that lifted its delicate head. Despite the genius of Milton, supreme artist plus supreme moralist, the Puritans managed somehow to force into the common mind an antagonism between Beauty and Morali

rule, reformers are lacking in the two things most sedulously cultivated by commercial travellers and life-insurance agents, tact and humour. If these interesting orders of the Knights of the Road were as lacking in geniality as the typical reformer, t

hing to do with it. It gives him the key to the hearts of children; to the basic savagery of a primitive black or a poor white; to peripatetic harvesters; to futurists, imagists, blue-stockings, pedants of all kin

ated "to Edgar Lee Masters, with great respect." He speaks of "the able and distinguished Amy Lowell," and of his own poems "parodied by my good friend, Louis Untermeyer." He says, "I admire the work of the Imagist Poets. We exchange fraternal greetings.... But neither my few he

olerance is inexhaustible, and makes him regard not only hostile

ings in their

ill one gras

a hole in my sh

, give him on

he gnaws my h

r lyrics o

ns when his application for food and lodging was received with a volley of curses, he honestly admired the noble fluency of his enemy. When he was harvesting, the singing stacker became increasingly and distressingly pornographic;

of spring are on

months, in m

the sh

ast evening he left for Dodge City to stay overnight and Sunday. He was resolved to purchase Atalanta in Calydon and find

er can a man understand men and women and children without loving them. This is one rea

exhibiting your art to a prodigious assembly of qualified critics. John Sargent knows that the majority of persons who gaze at his picture of President Wilson are incompetent to express any opinion; his subtlety is lost or quite misunderstood; but

s uncompromising-he taught the harvester not Mrs. Hemans, but Swinburne. He calls his own verse the higher vaudeville. But The Congo is the higher vaudevil

," in his fearlessness. He has this in common with the practicers of free verse, with the imagists, with the futurists; he is not in the least afraid of seeming ridiculous. There can be no progre

answer came to him in the form of another question: What if it should prove to be no mask at all, but just the man's own face? So there are an increasingly large number of readers who are

ve. But the blunders of an original man are sometimes more fruitful than the correctness of a copyist. Fur

had the fortun

caravels a t

niverse-he s

awns as when, h

ooked upon S

ast the setti

lands, of au

our blund

PAS

tween a drum-major and a botanist. The former marches gaily at the head of

o pace the ground, if

say belongs to Illinois. He showed his originality so early as the twenty-sixth of March, 1875, by being born at San Francisco; for although I have known hundreds of happy Californians, men and women whose love for their great State is a religion, Rober

900 he began farming in New Hampshire. In 1911 he taught school, and in 1912 went to England. His first book of poems, A Boy's Will, was published at London in 1913. The review in The Academy was ecstatic. In 1914 he went to live at Ledbury, where John Masefield was born, and where in the neighbourhood dwelt W.W. Gibson. His second volume, North of Boston, was published

d two contemporaries more wholly unlike both in the spirit and in the form of their work than Mr. Frost and Mr. Masters. Mr. Frost is as far from free verse as he can stretch, as far as Longfellow; and while he sometimes writes in an ironical mood, he never i

ideas on how poetry should be written. He did this with charming modesty, but his "explanations" were opaque. After he had continued in this vein for some time, he asked the audience which they would prefer to him do next-read

asons, with the emphasis on autumn and winter. One might be surprised at the infrequency of his poems on spring, were it not for the fact that his knowledge of the country is so precise and definite

aterial for poetry. But the expression of his poems does not seem naturally fluid. I suspect he has blotted many a line. He is as deliberate as Thomas Hardy, and cultivates the lapidary style. Even in the conversations frequently introduced into his pieces, he is as economical with wor

o intention of building futile walls around Mr. Frost's garden, nor erecting a sign with the presumptuous prohibition of trespassing beyond them, it is clea

ind me changed f

e of all I th

ospection gave him both the method and the insight necessary for the accurate study of nature and neighbours. He discovered what other people were like, simply by looking into his own heart. And in A Boy's Will we find that same penetrating examination of rural scenes and common objects that gives to

e the slow whee

poets. Out of the same soil Robert Frost has successfully raised three crops of the same produce. He might reply t

e knows that not only is everything related to every other thing, but that all things are related to the eternal mystery, their source and their goal. This is why the yellow pri

ould surely be a surprise, for with his lack of operatic accomplishment, and his fondness for heroes in homespun, he would seem almost ideally unfitted for the task. This feeling I find strengthened by his poem called An Equal Sacrifice, the only o

off from the actors to the whole class of humanity they represent. Just such a remark applies to Home Burial; it makes the reader think of the thousands of farmhouses darkened by similar tragedies. Nor is it possible to quote a single separate passage from this poem for each line is so necessary to the total effect that one must read every word of it to feel its significance. It is a masterpiece of tragedy. And it is curious, as one continues to think about it, as one so often does on finishing a poem by Robert Frost, that we are led first to contemplate the number of such tragedies, and finally to contemplate a stretch of life of far wider range-the broad, profound difference between a man and a woman. Are there any two creatures on God's earth more unlike? In this poem the man is true to himself, and for that very reason cannot in his honest, simple heart comprehend why he should appear to his own wife

hone, employed with such tragic effect at the Grand Guignol. Mr. Frost's art in colloquial speech has never appeared t

e the audience even as the wall itself. He hesitates as though he had a word in his hands, and was thinking what would be exactly the best place to deposit it-even as the farmer holds a stone before adding it to the str

ly sincere, he is truthful-by which I mean that he not only wishes to tell the truth, but succeeds

D H

y winter ev

all with w

the cottag

shining ey

t I had the

sound of

pse through

forms and yo

company out

here were no

repented, b

ndow but th

now my cre

slumbering v

nation, by

lock of a

on; it has an indescribable charm. It is the charm when j