Poetry comes nearer finality in embodying the exact meaning and intensity of human feeling than any other art. Human feeling, being the root of all individual intelligence, is the most inexplicable quantity in life. Intuition is the primary significance of our existence. And it is the quality which gives to poetry its visionary and spiritual substance. In a nation it is the register of a people’s culture.
The study of poetry in the magazines which I began ten years ago, has grown into the convincing evidence of the following pages of this book. During this time we have passed through a number of phases in our national life; but through these changing aspects of national aspirations, there has run, like a widening and brightening strand of culture, the development of a new period of poetry, both in its productive and appreciative aspects. From 1900 to 1905, poetry had declined; and I think there has never been another period in our history when so unintelligent and indifferent an attitude existed toward the art. The scale since 1905 has been ascending, and the high pitch of achievement has not yet been reached. Whether fine poetry creates a general and popular recognition of the art, or the sympathetic appreciation of poetry for itself encourages excellent production, I cannot say. But this is apparent: that a period or epoch of the highest achievement has always been one of popular appreciation.
A factor that should be taken into consideration, and which affects poetry and its audience, is the attitude of the book reviews in our most influential literary journals. A characteristic example is the New York Nation, which has been in the habit of grouping in a few articles during the year with indiscriminate selection, the volumes of poetry which it receives. In these reviews there is a supercilious and academic attitude which dismisses really important work with opinions which have every suggestion of preconceived judgment. One has only to turn back his files to the review of Masefield’s “Everlasting Mercy” and “The Widow in the Bye Street,” to see the type of poetry reviewing that is more common than uncommon in American periodicals and newspapers. I do not mean to make The Nation an exception, but an illustration of the kind of stewardship with which reviewers in some of our most authoritative publications perform the duties of a serious and distinguished branch of American authorship.
To show that there is a quality of poetry in our national production worthy of pride and support, it has been my privilege for a number of years to emphasize in an annual review the distinction of the verse in the magazines. Out of these reviews has grown a demand for a more permanent preservation of the best work, resulting in this annual “Anthology of Magazine Verse,” to which are added records, references, and criticisms, which constitute a “Year-Book of American Poetry.” While all the other arts have had this service performed in their interests, poetry, the one art that most needed such a special reinforcement of its achievement, has been permitted to drift along throughout our entire critical history without this sort of attention.
The poetry in the magazines this year has been of an excellence in the longer pieces beyond the standard of any year in which I have made these estimates. The selections in this volume give evidence of a serious, even anxious, probing of human life. The lyric, represented by some lovely work, has not been practiced with the same irresponsible emotional delight as in past years. Perhaps, there has never been a year when the American poets have shown the independence of their own efforts, when comparatively new work has been so free from English influences. What influences there are, seem to come from French sources. Vers libre has been taken out of the hands of weak and pompous innovators, and made a distinctive medium by a few earnest and powerful singers. The most notable distinction in this respect is to be found in the work of James Oppenheim, whose book, “Songs for the New Age,” is a milestone in our poetic progress. So is Vachel Lindsay’s new work. He has mastered a new form of poetic expression in his volume “The Congo and Other Poems.” Miss Amy Lowell, in the better parts of “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,” is working toward a new elasticity in rhythm, which is beginning to produce effective and beautiful results. On the other hand Mr. Arthur Stringer in “Open Water” utterly fails to embody in actual performance the principles expounded in the introduction to that volume, though this introduction is as important a piece of critical writing in English upon the subject as I know. No matter how revolutionary they attempt to be in expression, there is still in these writers a traditional note imbuing the substance which makes up the significant part of their creativeness.
The selections in this volume are chosen from all kinds and methods of poetic expression, and the reader’s attention is invited to their differences in many aspects—though the aspect of quality is, I think, of equal attainment in all—of such poems as Bliss Carman’s Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Percy MacKaye’s “Fight,” Vachel Lindsay’s “The Firemen’s Ball,” Eloise Briton’s “The Two Flames,” Conrad Aiken’s “Romance,” Olive Tilford Dargan’s “Old Fairingdown” and “Path Flower,” Joyce Kilmer’s “Twelve-Forty-Five,” and Don Marquis’s “The God-Maker, Man.” Of the shorter pieces, I think the standard is decidedly above last year’s quality. Mahlon Leonard Fisher has again followed the success of previous years with his sonnet “Afterwards,” which sustains his position as one of the foremost sonnet-writers this country has yet produced. This poet has the unusual distinction of a fine reputation without having published a book, but his definite contribution to American poetry will soon take place with the publication of his first volume, “An Old Mercer, and Other Poems.” A poem likely to create a profound impression is Don Marquis’s “The God-Maker, Man,”—a fine achievement, not only for its flashing images, but for spiritual substance shaped with compelling conviction.
The selections in this volume reflect the extraordinary richness of the published volumes this year. I do not recall any year of the past decade when the quantity and quality alike have been so notable. The autumn season’s publication of verse usually shows a preponderance in quality of books by English poets, who seem to meet with more favorable consideration from the best established publishers. There have been this year a number of notable volumes by English poets brought out in this country, but the balance of distinction, both in standard and numbers of books, belongs this year most emphatically to the American poets. Thirty-five volumes of distinguished poetry stand to our credit, and these are only a selection from a larger number of books which merit appreciation. Books by Louis V. Ledoux, George Edward Woodberry, Louis Untermeyer, Walter Conrad Arensberg, William Rose Benét, Vachel Lindsay, George Sterling, Olive Tilford Dargan, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Conrad Aiken, James Oppenheim, Harry Kemp, Amelia Josephine Burr, Joyce Kilmer, Amy Lowell, Percy MacKaye, Arthur Davison Ficke, Edwin Markham, Agnes Lee, and Bliss Carman, are among those which have advanced the significance of the year’s output.
The European war has had a more immediate effect upon literature than almost anything else. All books of a non-military character published just before the war, with the exception of poetry, have been thrown into relatively ineffective significance. Poetry endures because it is integrally woven with the warp of man’s real existence, and not of that illusory substance, of which other kinds of imaginative literature are fashioned, and which has been so easily wiped away by this war’s primal brutality. And poetry has aspired to sustain the nobler part of man’s nature during the confusion into which civilization has been plunged since the war began. The English people, who have been in the world’s vanguard practising democratic ideals, have, in their poets to-day, shattered the idol of war and are glorifying the ideals of peace.
The best poems in English directly inspired by the war have been produced by American poets. Of these I have gathered a representative group in this volume. The work achieved by Percy MacKaye on different phases of the European war has made more secure than ever his position as a poet. It is no exaggeration to say that the two groups of sonnets which originally appeared in the Boston Transcript in August and September, and which are now included in his volume, “The Present Hour,” are comparable as a whole to William Watson’s “The Purple East,” and in such individual pieces as “Kruppism,” and “The Real Germany,” he has done work finer and more impressive than is to be found in any of the older writer’s sonnets. Moreover, such pieces as “If!” and “The Other Army,” by Bartholomew F. Griffin; “Prelude,” by Edmond McKenna; “He Went for a Soldier,” by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, and “To a Necrophile,” by Walter Conrad Arensberg, are striking and spontaneous poetry of a high order. In E. Sutton, a poet is presented, who has produced martial poetry in “The Bugle,” “The Drum,” and the stirring “Pipes of the North,” which, for swinging rhythm and profound reflection upon the pomp and futility of military glory, has not been equalled by any contemporary poet.