What will be fairly obvious is that if we follow a little way any particular one of these critics, we shall find him attempting to urge our poetry in a particular direction, a direction which he prefers to any other direction, and analysing its origins in such a way, if he analyses at all, as to make plausible its (postulated) growth in that direction. This is the natural, even perhaps the best thing, for a participant critic to do—it contributes, certainly, an interest and an energy. But if in some freak of disinterestedness, we wish if for only a moment to see American poetry with no concern save that of inordinate and intelligent curiosity, then it is to all of these views that we must turn, rather than to any one, and to the obverse of each, as well as to the face. For if one thing is apparent to-day in a study of American letters, it is that we must heroically resist any temptation to simplify, to look in only one direction for origins or in only one direction for growth. Despite our national motto, American civilization is not so much one in many as many in one. We have not, as England has and as France has, a single literary heart; our literary capitals and countries are many, each with its own vigorous people, its own self-interest, its own virtues and provincialisms. We may attribute this to the mere matter of our size, and the consequent geographical sequestration of this or that group—that is no doubt a factor, but of equal importance is the fact that in a new country, of rapid and chaotic material growth, we must inevitably have, according to the locality, marked variations in the rapidity of growth of the vague thing we call civilization. Chicago is younger than Boston, older than San Francisco. And what applies to the large unit applies also to the small—if the country in general has not yet reached anything remotely like a cultural homogeneity (as far, that is, as we ever in viewing a great nation expect such a thing) neither has any section of it, nor any city of it. It is no longer possible, if indeed it ever was, to regard a section like New England, for example, as a definite environmental factor, say “y,” and to conclude, as some critics are so fond of doing, that any poet who matures there will inevitably be representable as “yp.” This is among the commonest and falsest of false simplifications. Our critics, frantically determined to find an American poetry that is autochthonous, will see rocky pastures, mountains and birches in the poetry of a New Englander, or skyscrapers in the poetry of a New Yorker, or stockyards in the poetry of a Chicagoan, as easily as a conjurer takes a rabbit from a hat.
What refuge we have from a critical basis so naïve is in assuming from the outset, toward contemporary American poetry, an attitude guardedly pluralistic—we begin by observing merely that American poetry is certainly, at the moment, if quantitative production and public interest are any measure, extraordinarily healthy and vigorous. We are accustomed to hearing it called a renaissance. The term is admissible if we carefully exclude, in using it, any implication of a revival of classicism. What we mean by it is simply that the moment is one of quite remarkable energy, productiveness, range, colour, and anarchy. What we do not mean by it is that we can trace with accuracy where this outburst comes from. The origins of the thing are obscure. It was audible in 1914—Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound were audible before that; it burst into full chorus in 1915; and ever since there has been, with an occasional dying fall, a lusty corybantic cacophony. Just where this amazing procession started nobody clearly knows. Mr. Untermeyer would have us believe that Walt Whitman was, as it were, the organizer of it, Miss Monroe tries to persuade us that it was Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, But the facts, I think, wave aside either postulate. If one thing is remarkable it is that in this spate of poetry the influence of Walt Whitman—an influence, one would suppose, as toxic for the young as Swinburne—is so inconsiderable: if another is even more remarkable, it is that in all this chorus one so seldom hears a voice of which any previous American voice was the clear prototype. We have had, of course, our voices—of the sort, I mean, rich enough in character to make imitation an easy and tempting thing. Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Sill, Lanier are not in this regard considerable,—but what of Poe, whose influence we have seen in French poetry on Baudelaire, and in contemporary English poetry on Mr. Walter de la Mare? No trace of him is discoverable, unless perhaps we find the ghostliest of his shadows now and then across the work of Mr. John Gould Fletcher, or Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, or Mr. Wallace Stevens, a shadow cast, in all these cases, amid much else, from a technical and colouristic standpoint, which would have filled Poe with alarm. And there is another American poet, perhaps as great as Poe, perhaps greater (as he in turn is perhaps greater than Whitman—as poet, though not as personality)—Emily Dickinson. Of that quietist and mystic, who walked with tranquillity midway between Blake and Emerson, making of her wilful imperfections a kind of perfectionism, why do we hear so little? Do we catch now and again the fleetingest glimpse of her in the early work of Mr. Robert Frost? If so, it is certainly nowhere else. Yet it would be hard to prove that she has no right to a place with Poe and Whitman, or indeed among the best poets in the language.
But nowhere in America can we find, for contemporary poetry, any clear precursive signal. Little as it may comfort our fuglemen of the autochthonous, we must, I think, look to Europe for its origins. This is not, as some imagine, a disgrace—it would be a melancholy thing, of course, if we merely imitated the European, without alteration. But Browning would hardly recognize himself, even if he cared to, in the “Domesday Book” of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mallarmé and Rimbaud would find Mr. Fletcher a mirror with an odd trick of distortion, Laforgue would have to look twice at Mr. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” (for all its Hamletism), M. Paul Fort would scarcely feel at home in Miss Amy Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle,” Mr. Thomas Hardy and the ghost of Tennyson would not quarrel much for the possession of Mr. Robinson’s work, nor Mr. Chesterton and the author of “The Ingoldsby Legends” for the lively sonorities of Mr. Vachel Lindsay. In such cases we have not so much “influence” as fertilization. It is something of Mr. Masters that “The Ring and the Book” reveals to Mr. Masters: something of Miss Lowell to which M. Paul Fort offers her the key. Was it a calamity for Baudelaire that he lived only by a transfusion of blood from an American? Is Becquer the less Becquer or Spanish for having fed upon the “Buch der Lieder”?... Culture is bartered, nowadays, at open frontiers, and if to-day a new theme, chord, or colour-scheme is French, German, or American, to-morrow it is international.
If we differ in this respect from any other country it is only that we are freer to exploit, really exhaust, the new, because we hold, less than any other, to any classical traditions: for traditions our poets seldom look back further than the 19th century. We have the courage, often indistinguishable from folly, of our lack of convictions. Thus it comes about that as America is the melting-pot for races, so she is in a fair way to become a melting-pot for cultures: we have the energy, the curiosity, the intelligence, above all the lack of affiliations with the past, which admirably adapt us to a task—so precisely demanding complete self-surrender—of æsthetic experiment. Ignorance has some compensations—I mean, of course, a partial ignorance. If Mr. Lindsay had been brought up exclusively on Aristotle, Plato, Æschylus, and Euripides, and had been taken out of the shadow of the church by Voltaire and Darwin, perhaps he would not have been so “free” to experiment with the “higher vaudeville.” It will be observed that this is an odd kind of “freedom,” for it amounts in some ways to little more than the “freedom” of the prison. For if too severe a training in the classics unfits one somewhat for bold experiment, too little of it is as likely, on the other hand, to leave one with an æsthetic perceptiveness, a sensibility, in short, relatively rudimentary.
This, then, is something of the cultural mise en scène for our contemporary poetry. We have repeated waves of European suggestion breaking Westward over our continent, foaming rather more in Chicago than in New York; and we have our lusty young company of swimmers, confident that they are strong enough to ride these waves farther than any one in Europe rode them and with a more native grace. What is most conspicuously American in most of these swimmers is the fact that they rely not so much on skill and long training as on sheer energy, vitality, and confidence. They rely, indeed, in most cases, on a kind of exuberance or superabundance. Do we not feel this in the work of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters—does he not try, in these many full books of his, where the good is so inextricably enmeshed with the bad, simply to beat us down as under a cataract? “Domesday Book” is, rather, an avalanche. He never knows what to exclude, where to stop. Miss Lowell, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Carl Sandburg, and Mr. Lindsay are not far behind him, either—they are all copious. I do not mean to imply that this is a bad thing, at the moment—at the moment I am not sure that this sheer exuberance is not, for us, the very best thing. Energy is the first requisite of a “renaissance,” and supplies its material, or, in another light, its richness of colour. Not the beginning, but the end, of a renaissance is in refinement; and I think we are certainly within bounds in postulating that the last five years have given us at the least a superb beginning, and enough more than that, perhaps, to make one wonder whether we have not already cast Poe and Whitman, Sidney Lanier, and Emily Dickinson, our strange little quartette, into a shadow.
All that our wonder can hope for is at best a very speculative answer. If parallels were not so dangerous, we might look with encouragement at that spangled rhetorical torrent which we call Elizabethan literature. Ben Jonson did not consider Shakespeare much of an artist, nor did Milton, and classicists ever since have followed them in that opinion. If one can be the greatest of poets and yet not much of an artist, we may here keep clear of the quarrel: what we get at is the fact that Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans participated in a literary movement which, like ours, began in energy, violence, and extravagance, was at its best excessively rhetorical and given to unpruned copiousness, and perished as it refined. Will a future generation see us in a somewhat similar light—will it like us for our vitality, for the reckless adventurousness of our literature, our extravagances, and forgive us, if it does not precisely enjoy as something with a foreign flavour, our artistic innocence? That is conceivable, certainly. Yet the view is speculative and we dare not take it too seriously. For if we have kept hopefully and intelligently abreast of the contemporary we have kept, none the less, our own very sufficient aloofness, our own tactilism and awareness, in the light of which we are bound to have our own scepticisms and self-distrust. I do not mean that we would perhaps prefer something more classical or severe than “Spoon River Anthology” or “The Congo” or the colour symphonies of Mr. Fletcher, merely on the ground that it is the intrinsically classical and severe which we most desire. What we seem to see in contemporary American poetry is a transition from the more to the less exuberant, from the less to the more severe; and what we most desire to see is the attainment of that point, in this transition, which will give us our parallel to the Shakespearean, if we may hope for anything even approximately so high; a point of equipoise.
This hope gives us a convenient vantage from which to survey the situation, if we also keep in mind our perception of American cultural heterogeneity and the rashness of any attempt to generalize about it. The most exact but least diverting method would be the merely enumerative, the mere roll-call which would put before us Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound as the two of our poets whose public literary activities extend farthest back, and after them the group who made themselves known in the interval between 1914 and 1920: Mr. Robert Frost, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Masters, Mr. Sandburg, Miss Lowell, Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, Mr. Wallace Stevens, “H. D.,” Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Miss Sara Teasdale. These poets, with few exceptions, have little enough in common—nothing, perhaps, save the fact that they were all a good deal actuated at the outset by a disgust with the dead level of sentimentality and prettiness and moralism to which American poetry had fallen between 1890 and 1910. From that point they diverge like so many radii. One cannot say, as Miss Lowell has tried to persuade us, that they have all followed one radius, and that the differences between them are occasioned by the fact that some have gone farther than others. We may, for convenience, classify them, if we do not attach too much importance to the bounds of our classes. We may say that Mr. Robinson, Mr. Frost, and Mr. Masters bring back to our poetry a strong sense of reality; that Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Pound, Miss Lowell, “H. D.,” and Mr. Bodenheim bring to it a sharpened consciousness of colour; that Mr. Eliot, Mr. Kreymborg, and Mr. Stevens bring to it a refinement of psychological subtlety; Mr. Sandburg, a grim sense of social responsibility; Mr. Lindsay, a rhythmic abandon mixed with evangelism; Miss Teasdale, a grace. The range here indicated is extraordinary. The existence side by side in one generation and in one country of such poets as Mr. Masters and Mr. Fletcher, or Mr. Eliot and Miss Lowell, is anomalous. Clearly we are past that time when a nation will have at a given moment a single direct literary current. There is as yet no sign that to any one of these groups will fall anything like undivided sway. Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston” and Mr. Fletcher’s “Irradiations” came out in the same year; “Spoon River Anthology” and the first “Imagist Anthology”; Mr. Robinson’s “Lancelot” and Mr. Bodenheim’s “Advice.” And what gulfs even between members of any one of our arbitrary “classes”! Mr. Frost’s actualism is seldom far from the dramatic or lyric, that of Mr. Masters seldom far from the physiological. Mr. Masters is bitter-minded, tediously explanatory, and his passionate enquiries fall upon life like so many heavy blows; his delvings appear morbid as well as searching. Mr. Frost is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense of pain: if it is the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it, none the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong. The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as tender as in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And can Mr. Robinson be thought a commensal of either? His again is a prolonged enquiry into the why of human behaviour, but how bared of colour, how muffled with reserves and dimmed with reticence! Here, indeed, is a step toward romanticism. For Mr. Robinson, though a realist in the sense that his preoccupation is with motive, turns down the light in the presence of his protagonist that in the gloom he may take on the air of something larger and more mysterious than the garishly actual. Gleams convey the dimensions—hints suggest a depth. We are not always too precisely aware of what is going on in this twilight of uncertainties, but Mr. Robinson seems to whisper that the implications are tremendous. Not least, moreover, of these implications are the moral—the mirror that Mr. Robinson holds up to nature gives us back the true, no doubt, but increasingly in his later work (as in “Merlin” and “Lancelot,” particularly the latter) with a slight trick of refraction that makes of the true the exemplary.
We cross a chasm, from these sombre psycho-realists, to the colourists. To these, one finds, what is human in behaviour or motive is of importance only in so far as it affords colour or offers possibilities of pattern. Mr. Fletcher is the most brilliant of this group, and the most “uncontrolled”: his colourism, at its best, is a pure, an astonishingly absolute thing. The “human” element he wisely leaves alone—it baffles and escapes him. One is aware that this kaleidoscopic whirl of colour is “wrung out” of Mr. Fletcher, that it conveys what is for him an intense personal drama, but this does not make his work “human.” The note of “personal drama” is more complete in the poetry of “H. D.,” but this too is, in the last analysis, a nearly pure colourism, as static and fragmentary, however, as Mr. Fletcher’s is dynamic. Mr. Bodenheim is more detached, cooler, has a more conscious eye for correspondences between colour and mood: perhaps we should call him a symbolist. Even here, however, the “human,” the whim of tenderness, the psychological gleam, are swerved so that they may fall into a fantastic design. Miss Lowell, finally, more conscious, deliberate and energetic than any of these, brilliantly versatile, utterly detached, while she “sees” more of the objective world (and has farther-ranging interests), sees it more completely than any of them simply as raw colour or incipient pattern. If the literary pulse is here often feverishly high, the empathic and sympathetic temperature is as often absolute zero.
Mr. Pound shares with Miss Lowell this immersion in the “literary”—he is intensely aware of the literary past, rifles it for odds and ends of colour, atmosphere, and attitude, is perpetually adding bright new bits, from such sources, to his Joseph’s coat: but if a traditionalist in this, a curio-hunter, he is an experimentalist in prosody; he has come far from the sentimental literary affectedness of his early work and at his best has written lyrics of a singular beauty and transparent clarity. The psychological factor has from time to time intrigued him, moreover, and we see him as a kind of link between the colourists and such poets as Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, and Mr. Wallace Stevens. These poets are alike in achieving, by a kind of alchemy, the lyric in terms of the analytic: introspection is made to shine, to the subtly seen is given a delicate air of false simplicity. Mr. Stevens is closest to the colourists. His drift has been away from the analytic and towards the mere capture of a “tone.” Mr. Kreymborg is a melodist and a mathematician. He takes a pleasure in making of his poems and plays charming diagrams of the emotions. Mr. Eliot has more of an eye for the sharp dramatic gesture, more of an ear for the trenchant dramatic phrase—he looks now at Laforgue, now at John Webster. His technical skill is remarkable, his perception of effect is precise, his range narrow, perhaps increasingly narrow.
Even so rapid and superficial a survey cannot but impress us with the essential anarchy of this poetic community. Lawlessness has seemed at times to be the prevailing note; no poetic principle has remained unchallenged, and we have only to look in the less prosperous suburbs and corners of this city to see to what lengths the bolder rebels, whether of the “Others” group or elsewhere, have gone. Ugliness and shapelessness have had their adherents among those whom æsthetic fatigue had rendered momentarily insensitive to the well-shaped; the fragmentary has had its adherents among those whom cynicism had rendered incapable of any service, too prolonged, to one idea. But the fetichists of the ugly and the fragmentary have exerted, none the less, a wholesome and fructifying influence. Whatever we feel about the ephemerality of the specifically ugly or fragmentary, we cannot escape a feeling that these, almost as importantly as the new realism or the new colourism, have enlarged what we might term the general “poetic consciousness” of the time. If there was a moment when the vogue of the disordered seemed to threaten, or predict, a widespread and rapid poetic decadence, that moment is safely past. The tendency is now in the other direction, and not the least interesting sign is the fact that many of the former apostles of the disordered are to-day experimenting with the things they yesterday despised—rhyme, metre, and the architecture of theme.