This must be known to appreciate the message of James Oppenheim. For it is pre-eminently as a message that these poems should be treated. They are of essential value as one of the most articulate efforts to translate that which in most people is mute.
There is an unmistakable kinship with Whitman in this work; not merely in the form,—which is here termed “polyrhythmic,”—but in the spirit, without hint of plagiarism or of abject imitation. Also we have the same breezy contempt for the petty trappings of civilization.
Here is an extract from the poem, Tasting the Earth, which has beauty as well as truth:
O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....
It was she with her inexhaustible grief,
Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,
And moan of the forsaken seas,
It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,
It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....
It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,