Or seeks to put the poet’s crown
Upon some pompous pedant clown.
No poetasters wore the bays
When Shakespeare wrote.
A. T. Schuman.
A LITTLE COMMENTARY ON CULTURED EUROPE.
I wish some eminent psychologist and impartial student of ineradicable racial traits would calmly investigate the popular myth of an “American” literature.
I valiantly insist upon the existence of literature in America, but do not see much prospect for an “American” literature.
I wonder if the critics who are optimistic about an “American” literature ever stop to consider the fact that two-thirds of the people who live in this country are of different stock than ours, and different racial traditions and language. Then they are from the depth of savagery. They are illiterate and brutal, and possessed of an unconquerable phlegm that cannot tolerate such trivial, foolish things as the arts and literature. Moreover, they are utterly out of sympathy with the ideals of our race.