The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century

by William Lyon Phelps

It is interesting that a cosmopolitan radical like Amy Lowell should belong ancestrally so exclusively to Massachusetts, and to so distinguished a family. She is a born patrician, and a reborn Liberal. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of Miss Lowell's grandfather, and her maternal grandfather, Abbott Lawrence, was also Minister to England. Her eldest brother, nineteen years older than she, was the late Percival Lowell, a scientific astronomer with a poetic imagination; he was one of the most interesting and charming personalities I ever knew. His constant encouragement and example were powerful formative influences in his sister's development. Another brother is the President of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, through whose dignified, penetrating, sensible, authoritative speeches and writings breathes the old Massachusetts love of liberty.

Courage is a salient characteristic in Amy Lowell. She is afraid of nothing, not even of her birthday. She was born at Brookline, on the ninth of February, 1874. "Like all young poets, I was influenced by everybody in turn, but I think the person who affected me most profoundly was Keats, although my later work resembles his so little. I am a collector of Keats manuscripts, and have spent much time in studying his erasures and corrections, and they taught me most of what I know about poetry; they, and a very interesting book which is seldom read today—Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy. I discovered the existence of Keats through that volume, as my family read very little of what was considered in those days 'modern poetry'; and, although my father Keats in his library, Shelley was barred, on account of his being an atheist. I ran across this volume of Leigh Hunt's when I was about fifteen and it turned me definitely to poetry." (Letter of March, 1918.)

When she was a child, her family took her on a long European tour; in later years she passed one winter on the Nile, another on a fruit ranch in California, another in visiting Greece and Turkey. In 1902 she decided to devote her life to writing poetry, and spent eight years in faithful study, effort, and practice without publishing a word. In the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1910, appeared her first printed verse; and in 1912 came her first volume of poems, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, the title being a quotation from the forbidden Shelley. Since that year she has been a notable figure in contemporary literature. Her reputation was immensely heightened and widened by the publication of her second book, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, in 1914. In 1916 came the third volume, Men, Women, and Ghosts.

She has been a valiant fighter for poetic theory, writing many articles on Free Verse, Imagism, and kindred themes; and she is the author of two works in prose criticism, Six French Poets, in 1915, and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, in 1917, of which the former is the more valuable and important. In five years, then, from 1912 to 1917, she produced three books of original verse, two tall volumes of literary criticism, and a large number of magazine poems and essays—a remarkable record both in quantity and quality.

Vigour and versatility are the words that rise in one's mind when thinking of the poetry of Amy Lowell. It is absurd to class her as a disciple of free verse, or of imagism, or of polyphonic prose; she delights in trying her hand at all three of these styles of composition, for she is an experimentalist; but much of her work is in the strictest orthodox forms, and when she has what the Methodists used to call liberty, no form or its absence can prevent her from writing poetry.

I can see no reason for either attacking or defending free verse, and if I had any influence with Miss Lowell, I should advise her to waste no more time in the defence of any school or theory, because the ablest defence she or any one else can make is actually to write poetry in the manner in which some crystallized critics say it cannot be done. True poetry is recognizable in any garment; and ridicule of the clothes can no more affect the identity of the article than the attitude of Penelope's suitors toward the rags of Ulysses affected his kingship. Let the journalistic wits have their fling; it is even permissible to enjoy their wit, when it is as cleverly expressed as in the following epigram, which I believe appeared in the Chicago Tribune: "Free verse is a form of theme unworthy of pure prose embodiment developed by a person incapable of pure poetic expression." Not at all bad; but as some one said of G. K. Chesterton, it would be unfair to apply to wit the test of truth. It is better to remember Coleridge's remark on poetry: "The opposite of poetry is not prose but science; the opposite of prose is not poetry but verse." Perhaps we could say of the polyphonic people that they are well versed in prose.

The amazing growth of free verse during the last ten years has surprised no one more than me, and it has convinced me of my lack of prophetic clairvoyance. Never an idolater of Walt Whitman, I have also never been blind to his genius; as he recedes in time his figure grows bigger and bigger, like a man in the moving pictures leaving the screen. But I used to insist rather emphatically that although he was said to be both the poet of democracy and the poet of the future, he was in fact admired mostly by literary aristocrats; and that the poets who came after him were careful to write in strict composition. In the 'nineties I looked around me and behold, Kipling, Phillips, Watson and Riley were in their work at the opposite extreme from Walt Whitman; he had not a single disciple of unquestioned poetic standing. Now, in the year of grace 1918, though he is not yet read by the common people—a thousand of whom read Longfellow to one who reads Whitman—he has a tribe of followers and imitators, many of whom do their utmost to reach his results by his methods, and some of whom enjoy eminence.

Those who are interested in the growth of imagist poetry in English should read the three slender anthologies published respectively in 1915, 1916, and 1917, called Some Imagist Poets, each containing poems nowhere previously printed. The short prefaces to the first two volumes are models of modesty and good sense, whether one likes imagist poetry or hates it. According to this group of poets, which is not a coterie or a mutual admiration society, but a few individuals engaged in amicable rivalry at the same game, the principles of imagism are mainly six, of which only the second is a departure from the principles that have governed the production of poetry in the past. First, to use the exact word: second, to create new rhythms: third, to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject; fourth, to present an image: fifth, to produce poetry that is hard and clear: sixth, to study concentration.

There are six poets adequately represented in each volume; but the best poem of all is Patterns, by Amy Lowell. In spite of having to carry six rules in her head while writing it—for if one is determined to be "free" one must sufficiently indicate the fact—she has written a real poem. It strictly conforms to all six requirements, and is at the same time simple, sensuous, passionate. I like it for many reasons—because it is real, intimate, confidential; because it narrates a tragic experience that is all too common in actual life; because its tragedy is enhanced by dramatic contrasts, the splendour of the bright, breezy, sunlit garden contrasting with the road of ashen spiritual desolation the soul must take; the splendour of the gorgeous stiff brocade and the futility of the blank, soft, imprisoned flesh; the obstreperous heart, beating in joyous harmony with the rhythm of the swaying flowers, changed by one written word into a desert of silence. It is the sudden annihilation of purpose and significance in a body and mind vital with it; so that as we close the poem we seem to see for ever moving up and down the garden path a stiff, brocaded gown, moving with no volition. The days will pass: the daffodils will change to roses, to asters, to snow; but the unbroken pattern of desolation will change not.

Publication is as essential to a poet as an audience to a playwright; Keats realized this truth when he printed Endymion. He knew it was full of faults and that he could not revise it. But he also knew that its publication would set him free, and make it possible for him immediately to write something better. This seems to have been the case with Amy Lowell. Her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, does not compare for a moment with Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. It seems a harsh judgment, but I find under the dome hardly one poem of unusual merit, and some of them are positively bad. Could anything be flatter the first line of the sonnet To John Keats?