But what greater poetry has been produced in the last two generations, than many of the novels and prose dramas written in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia? Why is there greatness in the poetry in these works? Is it not because of the character drawing, the delineation of great emotional conflicts, of the ecstasy bathing the ideas? Would these poets have been any the less great, had they continued to use the same ideas, emotions and situations, tricked out even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, tropes, allegories, high personages, supernatural agencies? In fact plays like Peer Gynt and The Sunken Bell are rather technically conventional as verse plays, but could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless and trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern "revolutionary" poets? The great poet who deals with the capabilities of man in experiencing emotion, and fears not to track the human soul, even into morbid feelings, who has the courage to challenge society with ideas, even though these arouse the most bitter antagonism of some of the leaders of society, is the man whom posterity will most enjoy, for he is most human and bold and he never loses sight of the fact that he deals with real ecstasy, and not with the cultivated nuances of some cliques of versifiers.
If the reader will make a close study of many of the revolutions in writing poetry, he will find that the great change often amounted to nothing more than the substitution
or creation of a new rhythm or trope for the one used by the old poet; such changes are of minor importance. No doubt our contemporary poets have done away with many conventions. They no longer employ inversions of words and phrases, nor cultivate the stock poetical terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic license. They no longer tolerate clichés such as whenas, o'er, whatime, dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, main, taen, athwart, e'en, forsooth, alack, oh thou, didst, hath, perchance, methinks, steed, gleeds, prithee, trow, 'neath, 'gainst, ween, wist, espy, twixt. But it took them a long time to discover what the prose writers always knew; namely, that distorted speech should be avoided in literature. But the avoidance of clichés does not make a poet.
Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy Lowell are artificial in substance and manner, labored and uninspired, dull and bookish, and lacking in human interest, ecstasy and ideas. Their technique may be different from that of the old poets, but these new writers often have no ideas, reveal no poetic personality, and convey no emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, and as a result they fall below even the old New England poets whom they despise. A poet like Longfellow may be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of such human interest as Evangeline, presents an idea against war as in The Arsenal at Springfield, or draws on his personal life in such fine lyrics as My Lost Youth, The Bridge, The Day is Done, he moves us and we know we are reading poetry, though it has not the emancipating and stimulating effect of some of the work of Walt Whitman. Lafcadio Hearn, by the way, condemned the tendency to depreciate Longfellow.
Many of our free verse writers produce no great poetry, even though they write in a medium that is the proper language of poetry. The opponents of the free verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's productions, are often right; these productions are not poetry because they lack ecstasy and ideas. Much of the work in the old forms produced to-day has more ecstasy, and hence it is poetry.
Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence to-day is outside the scope of this volume.
There has been much comment about the fact that we need and indeed are getting an American or national poetry. Now one of the things that Whitman has overdone was this demand for poetry that is distinctly American. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man first. A great idea like a passage in the Song of Myself could have been written by and can be appreciated by the people of another nation. A cry of sympathy for the sufferings of animals and man such as you find in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is not an American but a human note.
You can translate a love poem from the Greek, Latin, German, French or Italian into English prose, and if you remove the proper names or other unessential adjuncts, no expert or scholar will be able to tell what nationality the poem represents. No one has better shown the hollowness of the claimants for nationalism than James Russell Lowell in two essays on nationality in literature, one written in sympathetic review of Longfellow's Kavanagh and collected in The Round Table, and another in review of Piatt's poems, collected in The Function of the Poet.
Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely national poetry. True, there are national traits and
characteristics, modes of thought and feeling peculiar to different peoples, that enter into and distinguish every literature, but these do not usually make one literature so national as to be incomprehensible to other nations. When this does happen, the product has no universal appeal and hence is not great poetry. Again poetry may have local color; it may be steeped in national traditions, it may express a racial philosophy but it is then of value only in so far as it represents the mode of thinking and feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in the soil, be an indigenous product, depict native customs or a provincial life; it may depict certain types of heroes, and glory in the country of its birth, and describe its richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is universal, though it may be colored by national traits, though one nation may feel more keenly, or indulge a certain emotion more frequently than others. The heart and the head, the emotions and the mind, rule in writing. The Old Testament and Shakespeare are no longer national products for they speak to the whole world. They have the local color and the ideas of their time and depict a certain phase of life, but we all feel in reading these books that they are written about ourselves and to ourselves. "We have spoken too much about nationalist art, forgetting that though the roots may lie in nationality and personality, the results, independent of school and nation, should overleap boundaries and enter the universal heart." (Isaac Goldberg, Studies in Spanish-American Literature.)