Part 2

EUNICE TIETJENS (1884– ) The Most-Sacred Mountain 290 The Drug Clerk 291

SARA TEASDALE (1884– ) Night Song at Amalfi 294 Spring Night 295 I Shall Not Care 296 The Long Hill 296 Water Lilies 297 Tired 298

GLADYS CROMWELL (1885–1919) The Crowning Gift 299 The Mould 300

EZRA POUND (1885– ) A Girl 302 A Virginal 303 Ballad for Gloom 303 Δωρια 305 In a Station of the Metro 305

LOUIS UNTERMEYER (1885– ) Summons 307 Caliban in the Coal Mines 309 Swimmers 309 Hands 312 A Side Street 312

JEAN STARR UNTERMEYER (1886– ) High Tide 315 Autumn 316 Sinfonia Domestica 317 Lake Song 318

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER (1886– ) The Swan 320 London Nightfall 321 Dawn 322 Lincoln 323 The Skaters 327

“H. D.” (1886– ) Oread 328 Pear Tree 329 Heat 329 Lethe 330

WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT (1886– ) Merchants from Cathay 331 Night 335 How to Catch Unicorns 336

JOHN HALL WHEELOCK (1886– ) Sunday Evening in the Common 338 Beauty 339 Love and Liberation 339 Nirvana 340

JOYCE KILMER (1886–1918) Trees 341 Martin 342

SHAEMAS O SHEEL (1886– ) They Went Forth to Battle, But They Always Fell 344

ROY HELTON (1886– ) In Passing 346

DAVID MORTON (1886– ) Symbols 347 Old Ships 347

ORRICK JOHNS (1887– ) The Interpreter 348 Little Things 349

MARGARET WIDDEMER Factories 350 The Two Dyings 351 The Modern Woman to Her Lover 352

ALAN SEEGER (1888–1916) “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” 353

WILLARD WATTLES (1888– ) The Builder 355 Creeds 356

T. S. ELIOT (1888– ) Morning at the Window 357 From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 357 Prelude 358

CONRAD AIKEN (1889– ) Chance Meetings 360 The Fulfilled Dream 360 Miracles 363 Morning Song from “Senlin” 364

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY (1890– ) Quickening 367

LESLIE NELSON JENNINGS (1891– ) Frustrate 368

MAXWELL BODENHEIM (1892– ) Poet to His Love 369 Old Age 370 Death 370

EDWIN CURRAN (1892– ) Autumn 372 The Painted Hills of Arizona 372

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892– ) God’s World 374 Renascence 375 Pity Me Not 382 I Shall Go Back 382 The Pear Tree 383 Wild Swans 383

MARY CAROLYN DAVIES The Day Before April 384 The Apple Tree Said 385

WINIFRED WELLES (1893– ) From a Chinese Vase 386 Humiliation 386 Love Song from New England 387

HERBERT S. GORMAN (1893– ) The Fanatic 388

BABETTE DEUTSCH (1895– ) The Death of a Child 389 In a Museum 390

ALTER BRODY (1895– ) A City Park 391 Searchlights 391 Ghetto Twilight 392

STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT (1898– ) Portrait of a Boy 393

HILDA CONKLING (1910– ) Water 395 Hay-Cock 396 The Old Bridge 396 I Keep Wondering 397

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 399

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND POEMS 401

PREFACE _The Civil War—and After_

The end of the Civil War marked the end of a literary epoch. The New England group, containing (if Poe could be added) all the great names of the ante-bellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had outsung themselves; it was a time of surrender and swansongs. Unable to respond to the new forces of political nationalism and industrial reconstruction, the Brahmins (that famous group of intellectuals who dominated literary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from the native scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, echoed the “parlor poetry” of England, or left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves with translations. “They had been borne into an era in which they had no part,” writes Fred Lewis Pattee (_A History of American Literature Since 1870_), “and they contented themselves with reëchoings of the old music.” ... Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there appeared Longfellow’s _Divina Commedia_, C. E. Norton’s _Vita Nuova_, T. W. Parson’s _Inferno_, William Cullen Bryant’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and Bayard Taylor’s _Faust_.

Suddenly the break came. America developed a national consciousness; the West discovered itself, and the East discovered the West. Grudgingly at first, the aristocratic leaders made way for a new expression; crude, jangling, vigorously democratic. The old order was changing with a vengeance. All the preceding writers—poets like Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes—were not only products of the New England colleges, but typically “Boston gentlemen of the early Renaissance.” To them the new men must have seemed like a regiment recruited from the ranks of vulgarity. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Hay, Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Whitcomb Riley—these were men who had graduated from the farm, the frontier, the mine, the pilot-house, the printer’s shop! For a while, the movement seemed of little consequence; the impact of Whitman and the Westerners was averted. The poets of the transition, with a deliberate art, ignored the surge of a spontaneous national expression. They were even successful in holding it back. But it was gathering force.

THE “POST-MORTEM” PERIOD

The nineteenth century, up to its last quarter, had been a period of new vistas and revolts: a period of protest and iconoclasm—the era of Shelley and Byron, the prophets of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” It left no immediate heirs. In England, its successors by default were the lesser Victorians.[1] In America, the intensity and power of men like Emerson and Whittier gave way to the pale romanticism and polite banter of the transition, or, what might even more fittingly be called the “post-mortem” poets. For these interim lyrists were frankly the singers of reaction, reminiscently digging among the bones of a long-dead past. They burrowed and borrowed, half archaeologists, half artisans; impelled not so much by the need of creating poetry as the desire to write it.

From 1866 to 1880 the United States was in a chaotic and frankly materialistic condition; it was full of political scandals, panics, frauds, malfeasance in high places. The moral fiber was flabby; the country was apathetic, corrupt and contented. As in all such periods of national unconcern, the artists turned from life altogether, preoccupying themselves with the by-products of art: with method and technique, with elaborate and artificial conceits, with facile ideas rather than fundamental ideals. Bayard Taylor, Thomas Buchanan Read, Richard Henry Stoddard, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich-all of these authors, in an effort to escape a reality they could not express and did not even wish to understand, fled to a more congenial realm of fantasy. They took the easiest routes to a prim and academic Arcadia, to a cloying and devitalized Orient or a mildly sensuous and treacle-dripping Greece. In short, they followed wherever Keats, Shelley (in his lesser lyrics) and Tennyson seemed to lead them. However, not being explorers themselves, they ventured no further than their predecessors, but remained politely in the rear; repeating dulcetly what they had learned from their greater guides—pronouncing it with little variety but with a vast and sentimental unction. In their desperate preöccupation with lures and legends overseas, they were not, except for the accident of birth, American at all; all of them owed much more to old England than to New England.

WALT WHITMAN

Whitman, who was to influence future generations so profoundly in Europe as well as in America, had already appeared. The third edition of that stupendous volume, _Leaves of Grass_, had been printed in 1860. Almost immediately after, the publisher failed and the book passed out of public notice. But private scrutiny was keen. In 1865 a petty official discovered that Whitman was the author of the “notorious” _Leaves of Grass_ and, in spite of his great sacrifices in nursing hundreds of wounded soldiers, in spite of his many past services and his present poverty, the offending poet was dismissed from his small clerkship in the Department of the Interior at Washington, D. C. Other reverses followed rapidly. But Whitman, broken in health and cheated by his exploiters, lived to see not only a seventh edition of his great work published in 1881, but a complete collection printed in his seventy-third year (1892) in which the twelve poems of the experimental first edition had grown to nearly four hundred.

The influence of Whitman can scarcely be overestimated. It has touched every shore of letters, quickened every current of art. And yet, as late as 1900, Barrett Wendell in his _Literary History of America_ could speak of Whitman’s “eccentric insolence of phrase and temper” and, perturbed by the poet’s increasing vogue across the Atlantic (Whitman had been hailed by men as eminent as Swinburne, Symonds, Rossetti), he is led to write such a preposterous sentence as “In temperament and style he was an exotic member of that sterile brotherhood which eagerly greeted him abroad.”

Such a judgment would be impossible today. Whitman has been acclaimed by a great and growing public, not only here but in England, Germany, Italy and France. He has been hailed as prophet, as pioneer, as rebel, as the fiery humanist and, most frequently, as liberator. He is, in spite of the rhetorical flourish, the Lincoln of our literature. The whole scheme of _Leaves of Grass_ is inclusive rather than exclusive; its form is elemental, dynamic, free.

Nor was it only in the relatively minor matter of form that Whitman became our great poetic emancipator. He led the way toward a wider aspect of democracy; he took his readers out of fusty, lamp-lit libraries into the coarse sunlight and the buoyant air. He was, as Burroughs wrote, preëminently the poet of vista; his work had the power “to open doors and windows, to let down bars rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms, to escape narrow boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather than in a corner.” He could do this because, first of all, he believed implicitly in life—in its physical as well as its spiritual manifestations; he sought to grasp existence as a whole, not rejecting the things that, to other minds, had seemed trivial or tawdry. The cosmic and the commonplace were synonymous to him; he declared he was part of the most elemental, primitive things and constantly identified himself with them.

_“What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is Me.”_

And by “me” he meant not only himself but any man; Whitman’s entire work, which has so often been misunderstood as the outpourings of egotism, was never so much a celebration of himself as a glorification of the ordinary man, “the divine average.”

It was this breadth, this jubilant acceptance that made Whitman so keen a lover of casual and ordinary things; he was the first of our poets to reveal “the glory of the commonplace.” He transmuted, by the intensity of his emotion, material which had been hitherto regarded as too unpoetic for poetry. His long poem “Song of Myself” is an excellent example. Here his “barbaric yawp,” sounded “over the roofs of the world,” is softened, time and again, to express a lyric ecstasy and naïf wonder.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre of the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!

It is this large naturalism, this affection for all that is homely and of the soil, that sets Whitman apart from his fellow-craftsmen as our first American poet. This blend of familiarity and grandeur, this racy but religious mysticism animates all his work. It swings with tremendous vigor through “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; it sharpens the sturdy rhythms (and occasional rhymes) of the “Song of the Broad-Axe”; it beats sonorously through “Drum-Taps”; it whispers immortally through the “Memories of President Lincoln” (particularly that magnificent threnody “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”); it quickens the “Song of the Open Road” with what Tennyson called “the glory of going on,” and lifts with a biblical solemnity in his most famous “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

Whitman did not scorn the past; no one was quicker than he to see its wealth and glories. But most of the older flowerings belonged to their own era; they were foreign to our country—transplanted, they did not seem to flourish on this soil. What was original with many transatlantic poets was being merely aped by facile and unoriginal bards in these states; concerned only with the myths of other and older countries, they were blind to the living legends of their own. In his “Song of the Exposition” Whitman not only wrote his own _credo_, he uttered the manifesto of the new generation—especially in these lines:

Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia. Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts; That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings; Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus ... For know that a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wider, untried domain awaits, demands you.

THE AWAKENING OF THE WEST

By 1870 the public had been surfeited with sugared conceits and fine-spun delicacies. For almost twelve years, Whitman had stormed at the affectations and over-refinements of the period but comparatively few had listened. Yet an instinctive distaste for the prevailing superficialities had been growing, and when the West began to express itself in the raw accents of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, the people turned to them with enthusiasm and no little relief. Mark Twain, a prose Whitman, revealed the romantic Mississippi and the vast mid-West; Bret Harte, beginning a new American fiction in 1868, ushered in the wild humor and wilder poetry of California. It is still a question whether Bret Harte or John Hay first discovered the literary importance of Pike County narratives. Twain was positive that Hay was the pioneer; documentary evidence points to Harte. But it is indisputable that Harte developed—and even overdeveloped—the possibilities of his backgrounds, whereas Hay after a few brilliant ballads, reverted to his early poetic ideals and turned to the production of studied, polished and undistinguished verse. Lacking the tremendous gusto of Mark Twain or even the native accuracy of Hay, Bret Harte perfected a terse, dramatic idiom. Less exuberant than his compeers, he became more skilful in making his situations “effective”; he popularized dialect, sharpening his outlines and intensifying the power of his prose. Harte’s was an influence that found its echo in the Hoosier stories of Edward Eggleston and made so vivid an impress on nineteenth century literature.

To the loose swagger of the West, two other men added their diverse contributions. Edward Rowland Sill, cut short just as his work was gaining headway and strength, brought to it a gentle radicalism, a calm and cultured honesty; Joaquin Miller, rushing to the other extreme, theatricalized and exaggerated all he touched. He shouted platitudes at the top of his voice; his lines boomed with the pomposity of a brass band; floods, fires, hurricanes, extravagantly blazing sunsets, Amazonian women, the thunder of a herd of buffaloes—all were unmercifully piled on. And yet, even in 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), Sidney Lanier fashioned his intricate harmonies (1879), and Madison Cawein was beginning to create his tropical and over-luxuriant lyrics. A few years later (in 1888) Russell brought out his faithfully-rendered _Dialect Poems_ and the first phase of the American renascence had passed.

REACTION AND REVOLT IN THE ’90S

The 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 poetry-reading world was chiefly conscious of the passing of its leading singers for the last half-century. It was a period when they were recalling Emerson’s ‘Terminus’ and Longfellow’s ‘Ultima Thule,’ Whittier’s ‘A Lifetime,’ Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar,’ and Browning’s ‘Asolando.’” ... 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 moribund resignation; it is dead because it detached itself from the actual world, because it attempted to be a copied embellishment rather than an interpretation of life. 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. For theirs was a revolt without a program, a headlong flight to escape—what? In the very first poem, Hovey voices their manifesto:

Off with the fetters That chafe and restrain! Off with the chain! Here Art and Letters, Music and Wine And Myrtle and Wanda, The winsome witches, Blithely combine. Here is Golconda, Here are the Indies, Here we are free— Free as the wind is, Free as the sea, Free!

Free for what? one asks doggedly. Hovey does not answer directly, but with unflagging buoyancy, whipped up by scorn for the smug ones, he continues: