Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.
Aner Clute is the immortal girl of the streets. Chase Henry is the town drunkard of all time. The railroad lawyer, the corrupt judge, the prohibitionist, the various adulterers and adulteresses, the Sunday School superintendent, the mothers and fathers who lived for sacrifice in gratitude, joy,—all these people look out from this book with haunting eyes, and there are baffled mouths and brows calm in the facing of their destinies.
When a few of the pieces in this book reached Ezra Pound, the judgment he passed upon them was that they are real and great poetry from the hand of a new and a genuine American poet. It was Alice Corbin Henderson who was the first American critic to seize upon some of these poems as they were running in The St. Louis Mirror, and put them forward in Poetry as striking, indigenous, out of the soil of America as a home-land. William Marion Reedy, editor of The St. Louis Mirror, is accredited by Masters for the keen enthusiasm with which he helped him carry along the work of writing.
In the year 1914 Masters not only handled all of his regular law practice, heavy and grilling. Besides, he wrote The Spoon River Anthology. There were times when he was clean fagged with the day’s work. But a spell was on him to throw into written form a picture gallery, a series of short movies of individuals he had seen back home. Each page in the anthology is a locked-up portrait now freed.
The stress of this bore down on Masters. Just before the proof sheets for his book came to his hands, he went down with fever and pneumonia and a complex of physical ills. It was the first time in his life he was willing to admit he was “sick abed.”
There is vitality, drops of heart blood, poured into Lee Masters’ book. He has other books in him as vivid and poignant. Let us hope luck holds him by the hand and takes him along where he can write out these other ones.
Poetry and the Panama-Pacific
Eunice Tietjens
Has poetry, as an art, any meaning whatever for the American people, or has all the recent ink which has been spilled in proclaiming a renascence of American poetry gone only to water the roots of the publishing business? These are questions which will be forced upon the mind of every admirer of the lyric muse in contemplating the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. For in spite of the millions of money and the acres of ground at the disposal of the American sections there is nowhere, except in the commercial exhibits of the publishers, any recognition of the existence of contemporary poetry.
When taxed with the fact that the art is unrepresented the heads of the departments point deprecatingly to the fact that as a decorative feature of certain architectural archways poetical quotations are used. There is a quotation from Confucius, one from the Kalidasa, several from Edmund Spencer, and one (O Triumph of Modernity!) from Walt Whitman. As no commercial exhibit is accepted which was in existence at the time of the St. Louis Exposition this answer is doubly enlightening.