its most blatant fortissimos, Miller's poetry occasionally captured the lavish grandeur of his surroundings, the splendor of the Sierras, the surge and spirit of the Western world. Now that the leadership of letters had passed from the East, all parts of the country began to try their voices. The West continued to hold its tuneful supremacy; the tradition of Harte and Hay was followed (softened and sentimentalized) by Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley. In the South, Irwin Russell was pioneering in negro dialect (1875) and Sidney Lanier fashioned his intricate harmonies (1879). A few years later (in 1888) Irwin Russell brought out his faithfully rendered Dialect Poems and the first phase of the American renascence had passed. REACTION AND REVOLT IN THE '90s Reaction set in at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century. The passionate urge had spent itself, and in its place there remained nothing but that minor form of art which concerns itself less with creation than with re-creation. These re-creators wrote verse that was precise, scholarly and patently reproductive of their predecessors. "In 1890," writes Percy H. Boynton, "the poetryreading world was chiefly conscious of the passing of its leading singers for the last half-century." The poetry of this period (whether it is the hard, chiseled verse of John B. Tabb or the ornate delicacy of Richard Watson Gilder) breathes a kind of dying resignation. But those who regarded poetry chiefly as a not too energetic indoor exercise were not to rule unchallenged. Restlessness was in the air and revolt openly declared itself with the publication of Songs from Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia (1896) and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900). No one could have been more surprised at the tremendous popularity of these care-free celebrations (the first of the three collections went through seven rapid editions) than the young authors, Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. In the very first poem, Hovey voices their manifesto: Off with the fetters That chafe and restrain! Here Art and Letters, And Myrtle and Wanda, Here is Golconda, Here are the Indies, Here we are free Free as the wind is, The new insurgence triumphed. It was the heartiness, the gypsy jollity, the rush of high spirits that conquered. Readers of the Vagabondia books were captivated, though they were swept along by the speed of this poetry rather than by its philosophy. The enthusiastic acceptance of these new apostles of outdoor vigor was, however, not as much of an accident as it seemed. On one side, the world of art, the public was wearied by barren philosophizing set to tinkling music; on the other, the world of action, it was faced by a staggering growth of materialism which it feared. Hovey, Carman and their imitators offered a swift and stirring way out. But it was neither an effectual nor a lasting escape. The war with Spain, the industrial turmoil, the growth of social consciousness and new ideas of responsibility made America look for fresh valuations, more searching songs. Hovey began to go deeper into himself and his age; in the Mid-West, William Vaughn Moody grappled with the problems of his times only to have his work cut short by death in 1910. But these two were exceptions; in the main, it was another interval - two decades of appraisal and expectancy, of pause and preparation. This interval of about twenty years was notable for its effort to treat the spirit of the times with a cheerful evasive ness, a humorous unconcern; its most representative craftsmen were, with four exceptions, the writers of light verse. These four exceptions were Richard Hovey, Bliss Carman, William Vaughn Moody and Edwin Markham. Both Hovey and Carman saw wider horizons and tuned their instruments to a larger music. 66 Moody's power was still greater. In "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," he protested against turning the "new-world victories into gain" and painted America on a majestic canvas. In The Quarry" he celebrated America's part in preventing the breaking-up of China by the greedy empires of Europe (an act accomplished by John Hay, poet and diplomat). In "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines," a dirge wrenched from the depths of his nature, Moody cried out against our own grasping imperialists. It was the fulfilment of this earlier poem which found its fierce climax in the lengthy Ode, with lines like: Was it for this our fathers kept the law? This crown shall crown their struggle and their truth? Mewing its mighty youth?... O ye who lead Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite. Early in 1899 the name of Edwin Markham flashed across the land when, out of San Francisco, rose the sonorous challenge of "The Man with the Hoe." This poem, which has been ecstatically called "the battle-cry of the next thousand years" (Joaquin Miller declared it contained “The whole Yosemite-the thunder, the might, the majesty”), caught up, with a prophetic vibrancy, the passion for social justice that was waiting to be intensified in poetry. Markham summed up and spiritualized the unrest that was in the air; in the figure of one man with a hoe, he drew a picture of men in the mines, men in the sweatshop, men working without joy, without hope. To social consciousness he added social conscience. In a ringing blank verse, Markham crystallized the expression of outrage, the heated ferment of the period. His was a vision of a new order, austere in beauty but deriving its lifeblood from the millions struggling in the depths. Inspiring as these examples were, they did not generate others of their kind; the field lay fallow for more than a decade. The lull was pronounced, the gathering storm remained inaudible. 66 RENASCENCE 66 66 1913 Suddenly the new poetry burst upon us with unexpected vigor and extraordinary variety. October, 1912, saw the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a monthly that was to introduce the work of hitherto unknown poets and to herald the various groups, schools and " movements." The magazine came at the very moment before the breaking of the storm. Flashes and rumblings had already been troubling the literary heavens; a few months later - the deluge! . . . By 1917, the new poetry was ranked as America's first national art"; its success was sweeping, its sales unprecedented. People who never before had read verse turned to it and found they could not only read but relish it. They discovered that for the enjoyment of poetry it was not necessary to have at their elbows a dictionary of rare words and classical references; they no longer were required to be acquainted with Latin legendry and the minor loveaffairs of the major Greek divinities. Life was their glossary, not literature. The new product spoke to them in their own language. And it did more: it spoke to them of what they scarcely ever had heard expressed; it was not only closer to their soil but nearer to their souls. ROBINSON AND MASTERS One reason why the new poetry achieved so sudden a success was its freedom from the traditionally stilted “ poetic diction." Revolting strongly against the assumption that poetry must have a vocabulary of its own, the poets of the new era spoke in the oldest and most stirring tongue; they used a language that was the language not of the poetasters but of the people. In ordinary speech they rediscovered the strength, the secret core of the commonplace. 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 1879, in The Children of the Night, Robinson anticipated the brief characterizations and the etched outlines of Masters's Spoon River Anthology. 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. 66 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, 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 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. ROBERT FROST 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 ar |