“The Proud Farmer,” “The Illinois Village,” and “On the Building of Springfield”—three poems which conclude the General William Booth volume—are all on his favorite thesis and were favorites with his farmhouse auditors.
His poems related to the war reveal him as an ardent democrat, a hater of tyranny, a peace-loving socialist, and, in the end, like millions of his countrymen, a combatant pacifist, but none the less a pacifist in the larger sense. A pair of stanzas, “Concerning Emperors,” are a very pretty cue both to himself and his convictions. The first in fervent seriousness prays for new regicides; the second states the case unsmilingly, but as it might be put to any newsboy, concluding:
And yet I cannot hate the Kaiser (I hope you understand).
Yet I chase the thing he stands for with a brickbat in my hand.
This leads naturally to his verses of fancy and whimsy, like the group called the “Christmas Tree,” “loaded with pretty toys,” or the twenty poems in which the moon is the chief figure of speech. And these lead naturally to his distinctive work in connection with poetic form, his fanciful and often whimsical experiments in restoring the half-chanted Greek choral odes to modern usage—what W. B. Yeats calls “the primitive singing of music” (expounding it charmingly in the volume “Ideas of Good and Evil”). Mr. Lindsay, in the “Congo” volume has indicated on some of the margins ways in which the verses might be chanted. Before many audiences he has illustrated his intent with awkwardly convincing effectiveness. And with the Poem Games, printed with “The Chinese Nightingale,” he has actually enlisted unsuspecting audiences as choruses and sent them home thrilled and amused at their awakened poetic susceptibility. Mr. Lindsay’s theories are briefly indicated in the two books just mentioned, in Miss Harriet Monroe’s introduction to the former and in the poet’s explanation of Poem Games in the latter. They are briefly stated and should be read by every student of his work. Like most of the developments in modern poetry they are very new only in being a revival of something very old, but in their application they are local, and they partake of their author’s genial, informal, democratic nature in being very American. Among the contemporary poets who are likely to leave an individual impress on American literature, Mr. Lindsay, to use a good Americanism, is one of the few who “will certainly bear watching.”
Miss Amy Lowell (1874- ) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather, and she numbers among her relatives her mother’s father, Abbott Lawrence, minister to England, and a brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard. In her education general reading and wide travel were the most important factors. In 1902, at the age of twenty-eight, she decided to devote herself to poetry, and for the next eight years she studied and wrote without attempting publication. Her first verse was printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1910, and her first volume, “A Dome of Many-Colored Glass,” was published in 1912. Her further volumes have been “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed” (1914), “Six French Poets” (1915), “Men, Women and Ghosts” (1916), “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry” (1917), and “Can Grande’s Castle” (1919),—in all, four volumes of verse and two of prose criticism. She has been a conspicuous personality among contemporary poets in France, England, and America, and though she has not been lacking in self-assertiveness she has been without question chiefly interested in the progress of contemporary poetry and finely generous in both theory and practice in the support of her fellow-poets.
As one of her most recent critics has pointed out, she has been notable and notably American in her zest for argument and in her love of experiment—“a female Roosevelt among the Parnassians.” She has championed the cause of modern poetry and has fought the conventions of Victorian verse wherever she has encountered them, and in her liking for experiment and her absorption in technique she has taken up the cudgels successively for free verse, for the tenets of Imagism, and for polyphonic prose. She has been most closely identified with the activities of the Imagist poets,—three Englishmen, two Anglicized Americans, and herself,—and it is therefore well to summarize the six objects to which they committed themselves: (1) to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, (2) to create new rhythms as the expression of new moods, (3) to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject (within the limits of good taste), (4) to present an image (hence the name “Imagist”), (5) to produce poetry that is hard and clear, (6) to insist on concentration as the essence of poetry. A stanza from “Before the Altar,” the opening poem in her first book, serves to illustrate her technique as an Imagist:
His sole condition
Love and poverty.
And while the moon