villages should be centers of beauty, all its citizens, artists. At heart a missionary even more than a minstrel, Lindsay often loses himself in his own evangelism; worse, he frequently cheapens himself and caricatures his own gift by pandering to the vaudeville instinct that insists on putting a noisy "punch" into everything, regardless of taste, artistry or a sense of proportion. He is most impressive when he is least frenzied, when he is purely fantastic or when a greater theme and a finer restraint (as in "The Eagle That Is Forgotten") unite to create a preaching that does not cease to be poetry. Something of the same blend of prophet and poet is found in the work of James Oppenheim. Oppenheim is a throwback to the ancient Hebrew singers; the music of the Psalms rolls through his lines, the fire of Isaiah kindles his spirit. This poetry, with its obvious reminders of Whitman, is biblical in its inflection, Oriental in its heat. It runs through forgotten centuries and brings buried Asia to busy America; it carries to the Western world the color of the East. In books like War and Laughter and Songs for the New Age, the race of god-breakers and god-makers speaks with a new voice. Here, with analytic intensity, the old iconoclasm and still older worship are again united. SUMMARY THE NEW SPIRIT Most of the poets represented in these pages have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened to include things unknown to the poet of yesterday. They have learned to distinguish real beauty from mere prettiness; to wring loveliness out of squalor; to find wonder in neglected places. And with the use of the material of everyday life, there has come a further simplification: the use of the language of everyday speech. The stilted and mouth-filling phrases have been practically discarded in favor of words that are part of our daily vocabulary. It would be hard at present to find a representative poet employing such awkward and outworn abbreviations as 'twixt, 'mongst, ope'; such evidences of poor padding as adown, did go, doth smile; such dull rubberstamps (clichés is the French term) as heavenly blue, roseate glow, golden hope, girlish grace, gentle breeze, etc. The peradventures, forsooths and mayhaps have disappeared. And, as the speech of the modern poet has grown less elaborate, so have the patterns that embody it. Not necessarily discarding rhyme, regular rhythm or any of the musical assets of the older poets, the forms have grown more flexible; the intricate versification has given way to simpler diction, direct vision and lines that reflect and suggest the tones of animated or exalted speech. The result of this has been a great gain both in sincerity and intensity; it has enabled the poet of today to put greater emphasis on his emotion rather than on the cloak that covers it. One could go into minute particulars concerning the growth of an American spirit in our literature and point out how many of the latter-day poets have responded to native forces larger than their backgrounds. One could trace the rise of a new lyricism especially among the women poets. Never has there been so rich an offering of songs. One could chart the progress of unsentimental love-poems from the intensities of Emily Dickinson and the simplicities of Lizette Woodworth Reese to the varied resonances of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Elizabeth J. Coatsworth, Léonie Adams, Virginia Moore, and a score of others. Such a course would be endless and unprofitable. It is pertinent, however, to observe that, young as this nation is, it is already being supplied with the stuff of legends, ballads and even epics. The modern singer has turned to celebrate his own folk-tales. It is particularly interesting to observe how the figure of Lincoln has been treated by the best of our living poets. I have, accordingly, included six poems on this theme by six writers, each differing in manner, technique and point of view. To those who still complain that modern poetry lacks the clear, simple beauty found in the literature of the past, it may be answered that this is a complex and experimental 66 66 age. It is only when we understand part of our new American writing to be a literature of protest protest against ugliness, machine-made progress, standardized success that we can understand and appreciate its quality. As The Literary Review said, in an editorial in 1922: "We could not go on with sentimental novels and spineless lyrics forever. The artists had to refocus the instrument and look at reality again. . . . It is their task to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably, because it will accompany new truth; but they must have time. The 'new' literature deserves criticism, but it also deserves respect." For the rest, I leave the casual reader, as well as the student, to discover the vision and healthy differences in this, one of the great poetic periods in native literature. WALT WHITMAN Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island (“fish-shaped Paumanok"). When he was still a child, his father left the farm which had been in the family for generations, and the Whitmans moved to Brooklyn. There, after a fitful schooling, young Whitman became a printer's apprentice. For twenty years he earned his living as printer, reporter, editorial writer, occasional critic and itinerant journalist. He even wrote a crude tract disguised as a novel. Whitman was, however, anything but the "unlettered and uncultured primitive" whom his detractors (and some of his well-meaning apologists) have pictured. He had not merely read but absorbed Shakespeare, Homer, the Bibleand the elemental surge of these can be heard in his early prose poems and in the tentative first edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1855. A few American writers (notably Emerson) realized that a new force had been flung up in the Western world; in England, Swinburne and Rossetti were roused by the "buffalo strength" of this strange voice and its stranger accents. But criticism, for the most part, was as obtuse as it was adverse, and the favorites of the reading public continued to be the established group in and around Boston. Yet Whitman, undeterred by cultured jeers, feeling his foothold “tenon'd and mortis'd in granite," labored upon his magnum opus, changed titles, added entire sections, revealed, for all but careless readers, his essential artistry in the very quality of his emendations. By 1861 Leaves of Grass was in its third edition. During the Civil War, Whitman served as nurse and wounddresser a chapter in his life which has been insufficiently stressed – and, in 1865, he was given a position in the Department of the Interior. Here a certain secretary, James Harlan, having read Leaves of Grass in the edition which included Children of Adam, conferred immortality upon himself by dismissing Whitman because of his "pernicious writing." In 1866, Whitman's Drum-Taps appeared, a volume that not only reflected his war experiences but contained two of the most stirring elegies ever written. Less provocative than his first "barbaric yawps," such later works as November Boughs (1888) and Goodbye My Fancy (1891) are no less rich in observation and eloquence. Whitman died attended by the faithful Horace Traubel in Camden, New Jersey, March 26, 1892. The final estimate of Whitman's work is yet to be written. Whitman's very universality has defeated his commentators. To the craftsmen, Whitman's chief contribution is his form. Hailing him as the father of the free verse movement, they placed their emphasis on his flexible sonority, his orchestral timbre and tidal rhythms, his piling up of details into a symphonic structure. To the philosophers, he is the first of modern prophets; a rhapsodic mystic with a magnificently vulgar sense of democracy. To the psychologist, he is the most revealing of autobiographers. "Whoever touches this book, touches a man," ," he wrote, and celebrating himself hearty, gross, noble, "sane and sensual to the core"-he celebrated humanity. (See Preface.) The selections that follow are no more than a taste of this poet's magnitude. Whitman is most himself in the longer, panoramic poems and one of those would far exceed the allotment for the entire group. Selection is thus doubly difficult, and in this dilemma the editor has finally decided to omit the universally known "O Captain, My Captain!" in order to make room for less familiar but even more characteristic quotations. As I have already implied, his spirit's breadth is preeminent. It is this which has made Whitman so great an influence in Europe as well as in America, establishing him as the foremost genius which this country has yet produced. He is ample in the way that Shakespeare and Homer are ample; his range is all-inclusive, his material not dependent on time. His poetry achieves permanence because his medium is not words but elements. 66 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. |