E. A. Robinson had already been employing the sharp epithet, the direct and clarifying utterance which was to become part of our present technique. As early as 1897, in The Children of the Night, Robinson anticipated the brief characterizations and the etched outlines of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology; he stressed the psychological element with unerring artistry and sureness of touch. His sympathetic studies of men whose lives were, from a worldly standpoint, failures were a sharp reaction to the current high valuation on financial achievements, ruthless efficiency and success at any cost. Ahead of his period, he had to wait until 1916, when a public prepared for him by the awakened interest in native poetry discovered The Man Against the Sky (1916) and the richness of Robinson at the same time.
Frost and Masters were the bright particular planets of 1915, although the star of the latter has waned while the light of the former has grown in magnitude. Yet Masters’s most famous book will rank as one of the landmarks of American literature. In it, he has synthesized the small towns of the mid-West with a background that is unmistakably local and implications that are universal. This amazing volume, in its curiosity and comprehensiveness, is a broad cross-section of whole communities. Beneath its surface tales and dramas, its condensation of grocery store gossip, Spoon River Anthology is a great part of America in microcosm. The success of the volume was sensational. It was actually one of the season’s “best sellers”; in a few months, it went into edition after edition. People forgot Masters’s revelation of the sordid cheats and hypocrisies, his arraignment of dirty politics and dirtier chicanery, in their interest at seeing their neighbors so pitilessly exposed. Yet had Masters dwelt only on the drab disillusion of the village, had he (as he was constantly in danger of doing) overemphasized the morbid and sensual episodes, he would have left only a spectacular and poorly-balanced work. But the book ascends to buoyant exaltation and ends on a plane of victorious idealism. In its wide gamut, Spoon River, rising from its narrow origins, reaches epical proportions. Indigenous to its roots, it is stark, unflinching, unforgettable.
FROST AND SANDBURG
The same year that brought forth Spoon River Anthology saw the American edition of Frost’s North of Boston. It was evident at once that the true poet of New England had arrived. Unlike his predecessors, Frost was never a poetic provincial—never parochial in the sense that America was still a literary parish of England. He is as native as the lonely farmhouses, the dusty blueberries, the isolated people, the dried-up brooks and mountain intervals that he describes. Loving, above everything else, the beauty of the Fact, he shares, with Robinson and Masters, the determination to tell not merely the actual but the factual truth. But Frost, a less disillusioned though a more saddened poet, wears his rue and his realism with a difference. Where Robinson is downright and definite, Frost diverges, going roundabout and, in his speculative wandering, covering a wider territory of thought. Where Masters is violent and hotly scornful, Frost is reticent and quietly sympathetic. Again where Masters, viewing the mêlée above the struggle, writes about his characters, Frost is of the people. Where Robinson, in his more racy and reminiscent moods, often reflects New England, Frost is New England.
North of Boston is well described by the poet’s own subtitle: “a book of people.” In it one not only sees a countryside of people making the intricate pattern of their lives, one catches them thinking out loud, one can hear the very tones of their voices. Here we have speech so arranged and translated that the speaker is heard on the printed page; any reader will be led by the kind and color of these words into reproducing the changing accents in which they are supposed to be uttered. It is this insistence that “all poetry is the reproduction of the tones of actual speech” that gives these poems, as well as the later ones, a quickly-communicated emotional appeal. It endows them with the deepest power of which words are capable—the power to transmit significant sounds. These sounds, let in from the vernacular, are full of a robust, creative energy; they share the blood and bones of the people they represent.
But Frost is by no means the dark naturalist that many suspect. Behind the mask of “grimness” which many of his critics have fastened upon him, there is a continual elfin pucker; a whimsical smile, a half-disclosed raillery glints beneath his most somber monologues. His most concrete facts are symbols of spiritual values; through his very reticence one hears more than the voice of New England.
Just so, the great mid-West, that vast region of steel mills and slaughter-houses, of cornfields and prairies, of crowded cities and empty skies, speaks through Carl Sandburg. In Sandburg, industrial America has found its voice: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920) vibrate with the immense purring of dynamos, the swishing rhythms of threshing arms, the gossip and laughter of construction gangs, the gigantic and tireless energy of the modern machine. Frankly indebted to Whitman, Sandburg’s poems are less sweeping but more varied; musically his lines mark a great advance. He sounds the extremes of the gamut: there are few poems in our language more violent than “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter,” few lyrics as hushed and tender as “Cool Tombs.”
Like Frost, Sandburg is true to things. But Frost is content with the inexhaustible Fact and its spiritual implications; he never hopes to drain it all. Sandburg also feeds on the fact, but it does not satisfy him. He has strange hungers; he hunts eagerly for the question behind, the answer beyond. The actual scene, to him, is a point of vivid and abrupt departure. Reality, far from being the earth on which he dwells, is, for Sandburg, the ground he touches before rising; realism acts merely as a springboard from which this poet leaps into a romantic mysticism.
When Chicago Poems first appeared, it was received with a disfavor ranging from hesitant patronization to the scornful jeers of the academicians. Sandburg was accused of verbal anarchy; of a failure to distinguish prose matter from poetic material; of uncouthness, vulgarity, of assaults on the English language and a score of other crimes. In the face of those who still see only a coarseness and distorted veritism in Sandburg, it cannot be said too often that he is brutal only when dealing with brutal things; that his “vulgarity” springs from an immense love of life, not from a merely decorative part of it; that his bitterest invectives are the result of a healthy disgust of shams; that, behind the force of his projectile-phrases, there burns the greater flame of his pity; that the strength of his hatred is exceeded only by the challenge of his love.