THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY
AMY LOWELL
Miss Amy Lowell, America's chief advocate and practitioner of the new poetry, would wear, I supposed, a gown by Bakst, with many Oriental jewels. And incense would be burning in a golden basin. And Miss Lowell would say that the art of poetry was discovered in 1916.
But there is nothing exotic or artificial about Miss Lowell's appearance and surroundings. Nor did the author of Sword Blades and Poppy Seed express, when I talked to her the other day, any of the extravagant opinions which conservative critics attribute to the vers libristes. Miss Lowell talked with the practicality which is of New England and the serenity which is of Boston; she was positive, but not narrowly dogmatic; she is keenly appreciative of contemporary poetry, but she has the fullest sense of the value of the great heritage of poetical tradition that has come down to us through the ages.
There is so much careless talk of imagisme, vers libre, and the new poetry in general that I thought it advisable to begin our talk by asking for a definition or a description of the new poetry. In reply to my question Miss Lowell said:
"The thing that makes me feel sure that there is a future in the new poetry is the fact that those who write it follow so many different lines of thought. The new poetry is so large a subject that it can scarcely be covered by one definition. It seems to me that there are four definite sorts of new poetry, which I will attempt to describe.
"One branch of the new poetry may be called the realistic school. This branch is descended partly from Whitman and partly from the prose-writers of France and England. The leading exponents of it are Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters. These two poets are different from each other, but they both are realists, they march under the same banner.
"Another branch of the new poetry consists of the poets whose work shows a mixture of the highly imaginative and the realistic. Their thought verges on the purely imaginative, but is corrected by a scientific attitude of mind. I suppose that this particular movement in English poetry may be said to have started with Coleridge, but in England the movement hardly attained its due proportions. Half of literary England followed Wordsworth, half followed Byron. It is in America that we find the greatest disciple of Coleridge in the person of Edgar Allan Poe. The force of the movement then went back to France, where it showed clearly in Mallarmê and the later symbolists. To-day we see this tendency somewhat popularized in Vachell Lindsay, although perhaps he does not know it. And if I may be so bold as to mention myself, I should say that I in common with most other imagists belong to this branch, that I am at once a fantasist and a realist.