The blue sky pales to lemon, and great tongues of gold blind the shop-windows, putting out their contents in a flood of flame.
In her essay on John Gould Fletcher, in “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” Miss Lowell has defined the æsthetic intent of this poetic form: “‘Polyphonic’ means—many-voiced—and the form is so-called because it makes use of all the ‘voices’ of poetry, namely: metre, vers libre, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It employs every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times, but usually holds no particular one for long.... The rhymes may come at the ends of the cadences, or may appear in close juxtaposition to each other, or may be only distantly related.” These two forms, with the aid of the two formulas, may be tested at leisure from an abundance of passages; they correspond with their recipes, are distinct from each other, and have certain distinctive beauties. But a further experiment—the attempt to make the cadences of free verse harmonize with the movements of natural objects—is by no means so successful. “If the reader will turn,” says Miss Lowell, in the preface to “Men, Women and Ghosts,” “to the poem ‘A Roxbury Garden,’ he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up-and-down, elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock.” The following, presumably, is a segment of the circular movement:
“I will beat you Minna,” cries Stella,
Hitting her hoop smartly with her stick.
“Stella, Stella, we are winning,” calls Minna,
As her hoop curves round a bed of clove-pinks.
It is an example, in fact, of the fruitlessness of dwelling on a matter of artistic form till it becomes more important than the artistic content. Miss Lowell admits in this connection that there flashed into her mind “the idea of using the movement of poetry.” The student, therefore, should not regard the resultant verses as anything more than experiments in technique, and at the same time he should speculate as to whether a vital artistic form can ever be imposed upon a subject instead of springing spontaneously from it.
Yet, although Miss Lowell’s reputation rests mainly on her experiments in novel and striking poetic forms, most of her work has been written in conformity with classic traditions. The opening volume is all in common rhythms, and so is most of the second, and quite half of the third. The last alone is devoted to a new form; “Can Grande’s Castle” contains four long poems in polyphonic prose. The tendency is clearly in the direction of the innovations, but thus far the balance is about even between the new and the old.
As to subject matter, Miss Lowell’s thesis is Poe’s: that poetry should not teach either facts or morals, but should be dedicated to beauty; it is a stained-glass window, a colored transparency. And the poet is a nonsocial being who
spurns life’s human friendships to profess Life’s loneliness of dreaming ecstacy.