The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 18

Was there ever a better ill.u.s.tration of the uncritical a.s.sociation of names than the popular coupling of Robert Frost with Edgar Lee Masters? They are similar in one respect; they are both poets. But in the glorious army of poets, it would be difficult to find two contemporaries more wholly unlike both in the spirit and in the form of their work than Mr. Frost and Mr. Masters. Mr. Frost is as far from free verse as he can stretch, as far as Longfellow; and while he sometimes writes in an ironical mood, he never indulges himself in cynicism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Frost is nearer in his art to Mr.

Lindsay than to Mr. Masters; for his theory of poetry, which I confess I cannot understand, requires the poet to choose words entirely with reference to their spoken value.

His poetry is more interesting and clearer than his theories about it.

I once heard him give a combination reading-lecture, and after he had read some of his poems, all of which are free from obscurity, he began to explain his ideas on how poetry should be written. He did this with charming modesty, but his "explanations" were opaque. After he had continued in this vein for some time, he asked the audience which they would prefer to him do next--read some more of his poems, go on talking about poetry? He obtained from his hearers an immediate response, picked up his book, and read in admirable fashion his excellent verse. We judge poets by their poems, not by their theories.

Robert Frost is an out-door poet. Even when he gives a picture of an interior, the people are always looking out of the windows at something or other. In his poems we follow the procession of the seasons, with the emphasis on autumn and winter. One might be surprised at the infrequency of his poems on spring, were it not for the fact that his knowledge of the country is so precise and definite.

Spring is more beautiful in the city than in the country; it comes with less alloy. No one has ever drawn a better picture of a country road in the pouring rain, where "the hoof-prints vanish away."

In spite of his preoccupation with the exact value of oral words, he is not a singing lyrist. There is not much _bel canto_ in his volumes. Nor do any of his poems seem spontaneous. He is a thoughtful man, given to meditation; the meanest flower or a storm-bedraggled bird will lend him material for poetry. But the expression of his poems does not seem naturally fluid. I suspect he has blotted many a line. He is as deliberate as Thomas Hardy, and cultivates the lapidary style. Even in the conversations frequently introduced into his pieces, he is as economical with words as his characters are with cash. This gives to his work a hardness of outline in keeping with the New England temperament and the New Hampshire climate. There is no doubt that much of his peculiarly effective dramatic power is gained by his extremely careful expenditure of language.

It is, of course, impossible to prescribe boundary lines for a poet, although there are critics who seem to enjoy staking out a poet's claim. While I have no intention of building futile walls around Mr.

Frost's garden, nor erecting a sign with the presumptuous prohibition of trespa.s.sing beyond them, it is clear that he has himself chosen to excel in quality of produce rather than in variety and range. In the first poem of the first volume, he concludes as follows:

They would not find me changed from him they knew-- Only more sure of all I thought was true.

This is certainly a precise statement of the impression made on the reader who studies his three books in chronological order. _A Boy's Will,_ as befits a youth who has lived more in himself than in the world, is more introspective than either _North of Boston_ or _Mountain Interval;_ but this habit of introspection gave him both the method and the insight necessary for the accurate study of nature and neighbours. He discovered what other people were like, simply by looking into his own heart. And in _A Boy's Will_ we find that same penetrating examination of rural scenes and common objects that gives to the two succeeding the final stamp of veracity.

I do not remember ever having seen a phrase like the following, though the phrase instantly makes the familiar picture leap into that empty s.p.a.ce ever before the reader's eye--that s.p.a.ce, which like bare wall-paper, seems to demand a picture on its surface.

_Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand._

It is fortunate that the law of diminishing returns--which every farmer is forced to heed--does not apply to pastoral poets. Out of the same soil Robert Frost has successfully raised three crops of the same produce. He might reply that in the intervals he has let the ground lie fallow--but my impression is that he is really working it all the time.

The sharp eye of the farmer sees nothing missed by our poet, but the poet has interpretation as well as vision. He not only sees things but sees things in their relations; and he knows that not only is everything related to every other thing, but that all things are related to the eternal mystery, their source and their goal. This is why the yellow primrose is so infinitely more than a yellow primrose.

This also explains why the poems of Mr. Frost, after stirring us to glad recognition of their fidelity, leave us in a revery.

His studies of human nature are the purest realism. They are conversations rather than arias, for he uses the speaking, not the singing voice. Poets are always amazing us, and some day Robert Frost may astonish me by writing a romantic ballad. It would surely be a surprise, for with his lack of operatic accomplishment, and his fondness for heroes in homespun, he would seem almost ideally unfitted for the task. This feeling I find strengthened by his poem called _An Equal Sacrifice_, the only one of his pieces where anything like a ballad is attempted, and the only one in all three books which seems to be an undeviating failure. It is as flat as a pancake, and ends with flat moralizing. Mr. Frost is particularly unsuccessful at preaching.

No, apart from his nature poems, his studies of men and women are most impressive when they follow the lines of Doric simplicity in the manner of the powerful stage-plays written by Susan Glaspell. The rigidity of the mould seems all the better fitted for the suppressed pa.s.sion it contains, just as liquid fire is poured into a vessel with unyielding sides. His two most successful poems of this kind are _Home Burial_, in _North of Boston_, and _Snow_, in _Mountain Interval_. The former is not so much a tragedy as the concentrated essence of tragedy. There is enough pain in it to furnish forth a dozen funerals. It has that centrifugal force which Mr.

Calderon so brilliantly suggests as the main characteristic of the dramas of Chekhov. English plays are centripetal; they draw the attention of the audience to the group of characters on the stage; but Chekhov's, says Mr. Calderon, are centrifugal; they throw our regard off from the actors to the whole cla.s.s of humanity they represent.

Just such a remark applies to _Home Burial_; it makes the reader think of the thousands of farmhouses darkened by similar tragedies.

Nor is it possible to quote a single separate pa.s.sage from this poem for each line is so necessary to the total effect that one must read every word of it to feel its significance. It is a masterpiece of tragedy. And it is curious, as one continues to think about it, as one so often does on finishing a poem by Robert Frost, that we are led first to contemplate the number of such tragedies, and finally to contemplate a stretch of life of far wider range--the broad, profound difference between a man and a woman. Are there any two creatures on G.o.d's earth more unlike? In this poem the man is true to himself, and for that very reason cannot in his honest, simple heart comprehend why he should appear to his own wife as if he were some frightful monster.

He is perplexed, amazed, and finally enraged at the look of loathing in the wide eyes of his own mate. It was a little thing--his innocent remark about a birch fence--that revealed to her that she was living with a stranger. Grief never possesses a man as it does a woman, except when the grief is exclusively concerned with his own bodily business, as when he discovers that he has cancer or toothache. To the last day of human life on earth, it will seem incomprehensible to a woman that a man, on the occasion of a death in the family, can sit down and eat with gusto a hearty meal. For bodily appet.i.te, which is the first thing to leave a woman, is the last to leave a man; and when it has left every other part of his frame, it sometimes has a repulsive survival in his eyes. The only bridge that can really cross this fathomless chasm between man and woman is the bridge of love.

The dramatic quality of _Snow_ is suspense. The object through which the suspense is conveyed to the reader is the telephone, employed with such tragic effect at the Grand Guignol. Mr. Frost's art in colloquial speech has never appeared to better advantage than here, and what a wave of relief when the voice of Meserve is heard! It is like a resurrection.

In order fully to appreciate a poem like _Mending Wall_, one should hear Mr. Frost read it. He reads it with such interpretative skill, with subtle hesitations and pauses for apparent reflection, that the poem grows before the audience even as the wall itself. He hesitates as though he had a word in his hands, and was thinking what would be exactly the best place to deposit it--even as the farmer holds a stone before adding it to the structure. For this poem is not written, it is built. It is built of separate words, and like the wall it describes, it takes two to build it, the author and the reader.

When the last line is reached, the poem is finished.

Nearly every page in the poetry of Robert Frost gives us the pleasure of recognition. He is not only sincere, he is truthful--by which I mean that he not only wishes to tell the truth, but succeeds in doing so. This is the fundamental element in his work, and will, I believe, give it permanence.

GOOD HOURS

I had for my winter evening walk-- No one at all with whom to talk, But I had the cottages in a row Up to their shining eyes in snow.

And I thought I had the folk within: I had the sound of a violin; I had a glimpse through curtain laces Of youthful forms and youthful faces.

I had such company outward bound.

I went till there were no cottages found.

I turned and repented, but coming back I saw no window but that was black.

Over the snow my creaking feet Disturbed the slumbering village street Like profanation, by your leave, At ten o'clock of a winter eve.

A poem like that gives not only the pleasure of recognition; it has an indescribable charm. It is the charm when joy fades, not into sorrow, but into a deep, abiding peace.

CHAPTER IX

AMY LOWELL, ANNA BRANCH, EDGAR LEE MASTERS, LOUIS UNTERMEYER

Amy Lowell--a patrician--a radical--her education--her years of preparation--vigour and versatility--definitions of free verse and of poetry--Whitman's influence--the imagists--_Patterns_--her first book--her rapid improvement--sword blades--her gift in narrative--polyphonic prose--Anna Hempstead Branch--her dramatic power--domestic poems--tranquil meditation--an orthodox poet--Edgar Lee Masters--his education--Greek inspiration--a lawyer--_Reedy's Mirror_--the _Anthology_--power of the past--mental vigour--similarity and variety--irony and sarcasm--pa.s.sion for truth--accentuation of ugliness--a.n.a.lysis--a masterpiece of cynicism--an ideal side--the dramatic monologue--defects and limitations--Louis Untermeyer--his youth--the question of beauty--three characteristics--a gust of life--_Still Life_--old maids--burlesques and parodies--the newspaper humourists--F.

P. A.--his two books--his influence on English composition.

Among the many American women who are writing verse in the twentieth century, two stand out--Amy Lowell and Anna Branch. And indeed I can think of no woman in the history of our poetry who has surpa.s.sed them.

Both are bone-bred New Englanders. No other resemblance occurs to me.

It is interesting that a cosmopolitan radical like Amy Lowell should belong ancestrally so exclusively to Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 ma.n.u.scripts, 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.sed 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 Gla.s.s,_ the t.i.tle being a quotation from the forbidden Sh.e.l.ley. 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 quant.i.ty 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 cla.s.s 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 ident.i.ty of the article than the att.i.tude 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, pa.s.sionate. 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 pa.s.s: 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 Gla.s.s,_ 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?_

Great master! Boyish, sympathetic man!

The second volume, _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,_ which came two years later, showed a remarkable advance, and gave its author an enviable position in American literature. An admirable preface reveals three characteristics--reverence for the art of poetry, determination not to be confined to any school, and a refreshingly honest confession of hard labour in learning how to make poems. As old Quarles put it in the plain-spoken seventeenth century,

I see no virtues where I smell no sweat.