“And Lesser Things”
“—— and Other Poets”, by Louis Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Very, very clever. The ultimate emptiness of cleverness. These parodies are “not a piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition”,—the poet expects them to approach this “elevated and illuminating” standard; but they never reach satire, which is really the thing that is covered by the above quotation from Isaac Disraeli.
Untermeyer’s verse, including Challenge and that so quantitatively published in the magazines,—still speaking comparatively,—has the same relation to poetry as Urban’s scenery for The Follies has to his Boston Opera settings; or of all of Urban’s work to that of the numerous German poster school of five or eight years ago. Untermeyer is lenient in parodying poets of his own ilk—but it is easy to determine which of those he does not respect by his obvious, spiteful absurdities.
For years now newspaper paragraphers, “poets”, and editors have been saying such things as “It is time we are getting ourselves talked about” when mentioning Ezra Pound. Untermeyer stoops to it; he is still the “once born” when being “critical” about Amy Lowell: “A blue herring sings”. What he is really parodying here is his colleague Walt Mason’s prose-printed jingles which are syndicated throughout newspaperdom; he is not giving a “critical exposition” of polyphonic prose. It will need a keener critic or poet than he to do it—or to produce a parody or satire whose art equals that of the thing satired—Masters’s things for example. By ambling through thirty-seven lines Untermeyer imagines that he is being master of the situation as regards Masters. And the last line of the parody on James Oppenheim might very well have been written by Untermeyer himself as one of his own: “Clad in the dazzling splendor of my awakened self”.... No matter what may have been your attitude toward the poets parodied these things leave your feelings unchanged—except that he makes more definite your attitude towards him.