THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
AUTHORS EDITION 
 
 Limited to one hundred and fifty copies 
 
THE 
 YOUNG IDEA 
 
 An Anthology of Opinion Concerning the 
 
 Spirit and Aims of Contemporary 
 
 American Literature 
 
 BY 
 LLOYD R. MORRIS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DUPFIELD AND COMPANY 
 1917 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY 
 DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 
 
NOTE 
 
 The thanks of the author are due th_ 
 following editors and publishers for permis- <- 
 sion to reprint in the present volume mate 
 rial copyrighted by them: To Messrs. 
 Henry Holt and Company, for the use of 
 the essay by Mr. Louis Untermeyer, a com 
 pilation of three causeries which originally 
 appeared in the Review of Reviews, the Chi 
 cago Evening Post and the New York 
 Evening Post, published in pamphlet form 
 by Henry Holt and Company as "The New 
 Spirit in American Poetry:" To Mr. Mitch 
 ell Kennerley, for the use of several para 
 graphs from Mr. John Curtis Underwood s 
 "Literature and Insurgency:" To the edi 
 tors of the North American Review for the 
 privilege of reprinting Mr. Arthur Davison 
 Ficke s essay, "Modern Tendencies in 
 Poetry:" To Mr. William Marion Reedy 
 for permission to reprint "Home Rule in 
 Poetry," by Mr. Vachel Lindsay, from 
 
 Reedy s Mirror. 
 
 v 
 
 M265589 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION -- ; i 
 
 I THE EMPIRICISTS : The Kenascence of Com 
 
 mon Experience - - - - 3 
 
 * Conrad Aikeh. 7 
 
 "Witter Bynner 10 
 
 Will Levington Comfort - - 11 
 
 Max Eastman 15 
 
 Donald Evans 18 
 
 John Erskine 20 
 
 Arthur Davison Ficke - - - 22 
 
 Vachel Lindsay ----- 47 
 
 Harriet Munroe ----- 56 
 James Oppenheim - - - - 66 
 Louis Untermeyer - - - - 72 
 Margaret Widdemer - - - 90 
 
 II THE ROMANTICISTS 97 
 
 (1) Imagism - - 100 
 
 John Gould Fletcher - - - - 100 
 
 Amy Lowell 110 
 
 (2) Spectrism 114 
 
 Anne Knish - 114 
 
 Emanuel Morgan 116 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 III THE IDEALISTS : The Renascence of Spirit 
 
 uality 121 
 
 William Rose Benet 123 
 
 Joyce Kilmer -__ 128 
 
 Josephine Preston Peabody - - - - 134 
 
 Ridgely Torrence 140 
 
 IV THE PESSIMISTS 145 
 
 Benjamin De Casseres 145 
 
 Floyd Dell 147 
 
 Donald Marquis 149 
 
 John Curtis Underwood 150 
 
 V THE TRADITIONALISTS 173 
 
 Fannie Stearns Gifford ----- 174 
 
 Louis V. Ledoux 177 
 
 John G. Neihardt 188 
 
 Edward Arlington Robinson - - - 193 
 
 Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff - - - 196 
 
 Thomas Walsh 198 
 
 CONCLUSION 205 
 
THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE YOUNG IDEA is an outgrowth of the 
 widespread revival of interest in literature, 
 and more especially in poetry, which, during 
 the past few years, has afforded one of the 
 most arresting phenomena in the entire 
 course of our literary history. This literary 
 revival has brought with it a fresh content 
 and many innovations in form, and of these 
 much has been written in interpretation by 
 critics of literature, and, frequently, by the 
 authors and poets who have been concerned 
 with establishing the ideals of what has been 
 called the "new literature." But in some 
 degree these various critical discussions and 
 explanations have lacked co-ordination, and, 
 while Mr. Braithwaite s annual anthology 
 has provided the basis for a survey of the 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 yearly accomplishment of the poets, there 
 has been no attempt made thus far to pro 
 vide its complement in criticism, a collective 
 statement of the ideals and the ideas upon 
 which rests the work of contemporary Amer 
 ican writers. Moreover, the confusion with 
 which the public has received the work of 
 the more radical of these innovators has been 
 paralleled, in some instances, by the dismay 
 of the critics confronted with a literature 
 with whose fundamental contentions they 
 were unacquainted. 
 
 It is to fill this void that THE YOUNG IDEA 
 has been compiled. Any ambitious critic who 
 would interpret the ideals which are finding 
 expression in contemporary American writ 
 ing, would, in doing so, hold himself open 
 to the charges of misconception and of lack 
 of receptivity. How, then, solve the dilemma 
 otherwise than by requesting from each in 
 dividual author a statement of his or her 
 ideals, a definition of the essential intention 
 of his or her art? \ 
 
 This was a solution which apparently had 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 not heretofore recommended itself to the 
 critics. And so the following letter was sent 
 out: 
 
 My dear Mr. 
 
 I am compiling a statement of opinion by 
 the younger groups of American writers 
 concerning the contemporary and future 
 temper of our literature. I believe that such 
 a statement would possess sound value as 
 creative criticism and would center public 
 attention upon the ideals of the generation 
 in between. A well-known publisher has 
 offered to take the book, believing as firmly 
 as myself in the value of such a symposium 
 in clarifying the ideals and determining the 
 essential direction both of the literature that 
 is being written to-day and that which lies 
 in the dreams and aspirations of our writers. 
 
 Will you not, then, aid me in my investi 
 gation by contributing a reply to the follow 
 ing questions? 
 
 Do you believe that there is manifest to 
 day a new movement in our literature? If 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 so, what are its ideals? What relation does 
 it bear to the immediate past? Which of its 
 many currents seem to you to be the most 
 important? What relation does your own 
 work bear to this new movement? What 
 is your criticism of contemporary American 
 literature? 
 
 I shall hold myself deeply indebted to you 
 for your valued opinion concerning these 
 questions, which appear to me to be both 
 important and interesting. Please feel free 
 to reply to them, either directly as I have 
 stated them, or to view the subject in a dif 
 ferent light. In a word, where does our 
 literature stand to-day, and whither is it 
 going? 
 
 Whatever you say will be published in 
 exactly your own words, over your own sig 
 nature, and there will be an introductory and 
 concluding essay dealing with the question 
 as a whole. I am endeavoring to make this 
 inquiry as serious as possible, and as repre 
 sentative of the ideals of our writers of to 
 day and tomorrow. 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 I am enclosing herewith a stamped and 
 addressed envelope, hoping that you will find 
 it convenient to favor me with your opinion. 
 May I not call your attention to the im 
 portance of your individual opinion to the 
 investigation as a whole, and respectfully 
 urge you to favor me with it? 
 
 It was sent, not to those writers of whom, 
 because of our long acquaintance with their 
 art, it may without presumption be predicted 
 that their philosophies are accomplished facts 
 and that their work is likely to suffer little 
 change in the future, but to those writers 
 who, since they are shaping our contempo 
 rary literature by expressing the spirit of 
 today, are also in a measure illuminating 
 our literary ideals of tomorrow. It is in this 
 sense that this little book justifies its claim 
 to be an expression of the young idea. For 
 it is only in the degree that we are aware 
 of what our quest is today, that we may 
 hope for enlightenment of the spirit of the 
 immediate future, 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 The response to this inquiry has been most 
 gratifying, and the authors whose contribu 
 tions to the investigation appear in the body 
 of this book have co-operated generously 
 by stating frankly what they are about. The 
 fact that absolute freedom of statement was 
 a condition of the inquiry accounts for the 
 disparity in length between the various con 
 tributions. 
 
 A word must necessarily be said in ex 
 planation of the grouping of the contribu 
 tions. As I read the replies, I discovered 
 certain outstanding ideas so strongly em 
 phasized that, when they appeared common 
 to the points of view of several of the writers, 
 they suggested the divisions because of an 
 essential unity of direction. 
 
 Thus, for example, the writers who Have 
 been grouped as The Empiricists have indi 
 vidually emphasized as the most important 
 content of their art a concern with the com 
 mon experience of contemporary American 
 life. The Idealists share the belief that the 
 most significant tendency in our contempor- 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 ary poetry is its return to primitive faith and 
 its expression of spiritual experience. 
 
 The chapter called the Romanticists in 
 cludes expressions of the philosophy of 
 two movements whose existence is defi 
 nitely admitted; the oldest and the youngest 
 of those groups of contemporary poets who, 
 holding certain ideals in common, have 
 formed schools and promulgated consistent 
 programs. And since both of these schools 
 have been, in their art, concerned chiefly with 
 the extension of poetic form, always a ro 
 mantic revolt, I have grouped them as Ro 
 manticists. The Pessimists are those who 
 find nothing of any essential importance in 
 contemporary American letters ; and one of 
 them grounds his pessimism upon a flagellat 
 ing denunciation of our contemporary na 
 tional life. The Traditionalists, I think, re 
 quire no explanation. 
 
 I hope that the readers of this little book 
 will derive from it a fuller understanding of 
 the aims and of the ideals of our own contem 
 porary writers, For if we believe that lit- 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 erature is a record of and a reaction to ex 
 perience, we shall learn from our writers 
 what it is, in thought and in feeling, that 
 we stand for as a nation. Our literature has, 
 quite obviously, been undergoing certain 
 changes; and we should discover whether 
 these changes are the expression of a parallel 
 process taking place in our national con 
 sciousness and in our national experience. 
 If we find that they are, we must believe 
 that we are in a period of transition between 
 old ideals and new ones. And, should we 
 find this to be the case, it is to our writers 
 that we must look for the light wherewith 
 we may see the ideals of tomorrow. 
 
 LLOYD R. MORRIS. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS: 
 
 THE RENASCENCE OF COMMON 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 
 
 EMPIRICISM as a philosophical doctrine 
 implies actual contact with experience; in 
 its strictest form it claims that all knowledge 
 is derived from experience through the 
 senses. It would be unfair, however, to 
 adopt this term of philosophical usage and 
 employ it as a generic description of a group 
 of writers who share in common certain 
 ideals, without explaining the significance 
 which, in so doing, we attach to the word 
 itself. 
 
 The writers in question unite in express 
 ing a lively interest in the world about them, 
 in how people in their time and country are 
 living, and what they are thinking and feel 
 ing. They are concerned with the problems, 
 social, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, which 
 
 3 
 
4 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 arise from an attempt to adjust American 
 life to American ideals. As poets they are 
 refusing to be bound by rules or traditions 
 inherited from the past which would limit the 
 subject-matter of their art. They are claim 
 ing the freedom of selection of the novelist, 
 the right to deal with life as they find it, and 
 in its own terms. And in so doing, they are 
 bringing about a change in our conception 
 of what actually is meant by the word poetic. 
 In this discovery of the romance of the 
 commonplace there is evident a riotous in 
 toxication. In the true sense of the word 
 it has been a discovery, and the poets, having 
 broken the bonds, whether fancied or real, 
 which shackled them to a conventionally 
 accepted relation to experience, have become 
 drunk with life. They are experiencing a 
 magic wonder at familiar things with some 
 thing of the same penetrating vision and in 
 stinctive truthful reaction we find in children 
 who are called upon to adjust themselves 
 for the first time to a new situation of which 
 they have previously been told nothing. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 5 
 
 Wonder comes with difficulty to the sophisti 
 cated soul. And the person whom conven 
 tion has taught what he should and what he 
 should not see is likely to be ashamed of and 
 to suppress the immediate and natural re 
 action to experience which either disconcerts 
 or charms us when it is expressed by a child 
 like mind. These poets are the childlike 
 minds of our day. They are discovering 
 to us what we might discover for ourselves 
 had we their vision and their courage. They 
 are enthralled by the strange spell of their 
 own time, by its science, its mechanical in 
 ventions, its laboring masses, its tremendous 
 industrial activity, its new ways of living 
 and thinking. The most thoughtful among 
 them are asking its meaning in terms of in 
 telligence or spirituality, seeking to extend 
 their discovery beyond the mere surface of 
 common experience into the realm of the 
 mind and the spirit, reading the contempo 
 rary in the light of the eternal. The others 
 are content to record their immediate and 
 instructive reaction to common experience; 
 
6 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 itself. But they share the instant and pres 
 ent quest of the pattern of daily life and its 
 problems. 
 
 Some writers in every age, perhaps, have 
 made this discovery of their own times. But 
 rarely before has the search and the discov 
 ery been so general, and the writers, as 
 many of them here point out, been so busy 
 in making the discovery of their own mind. 
 The combination of conscious introspection 
 and a naive reaction to everyday experience 
 is one of rare novelty, and it has bestowed 
 a peculiar flavor upon our literature. 
 Finally, each age, in making its own world, 
 is making a new world ; and its discovery is 
 each time a fresh discovery. 
 
 So that this new spirit in our literature 
 may be called the spirit of empiricism, and 
 the writers who are expressing it are em 
 piricists, in that they are testing out their 
 art in the light of common experience, and 
 demanding of it that it shall express an 
 honest and sincere reaction to our life, our 
 thought and our feelings to-day. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 7 
 
 Mr. Conrad Aiken, the author of "Earth 
 Triumphant," "Turns and Movies," and 
 "The Jig of Forslin," in the following letter 
 clearly defines the fundamental intention of 
 his art. But his letter is something more 
 than a personal definition; it is an exception 
 ally penetrating diagnosis of the contempor 
 ary state of American poetry. 
 
 In one respect the literary situation in 
 America today is an anomalous one. In so 
 far as there is a definite revival of letters 
 here, and I think there is, it is limited almost 
 entirely to the domain of poetry. It is as if 
 the poets had got tired of waiting for the 
 novelists to take hold of modern ideas and 
 modern conditions, to bring literature up to 
 date, and had resolved to do it themselves. 
 While the greater part of our fiction is still 
 amiably superficial and romantically ideal 
 istic, with here and there such encouraging 
 exceptions as the work of Theodore Dreiser, 
 our poets have all of a sudden, and with an 
 extraordinary simultaneity which reminds 
 
8 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 us almost of the Elizabethan age, extended 
 the claims of poetry in many new directions 
 and with considerable success. Poetry has 
 now appeared among the best sellers, and it 
 would not be at all surprising, and, to my 
 mind, a good thing, if poetry should to some 
 extent usurp the field of the novel or of the 
 epic in fact, be restored to its original 
 estate, with all life for its province, and all 
 knowledge, too. 
 
 Several distinct tendencies are manifest 
 in this poetic renaissance. At bottom, two 
 ordinarily antithetical currents are now flow 
 ing side by side: the romantic and the real 
 istic. Each of these two main currents can 
 be divided into subsidiary currents ; there are 
 conservative romanticists and radical, just 
 as there are conservative and radical realists. 
 Of the realists, Masters to choose one ex 
 ample is the most radical, both as regards 
 form and ideas, and Frost, perhaps, the most 
 conservative. Of the romanticists, I think 
 it might be said that Fletcher is the most 
 consistently radical and the Imagists in 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 9 
 
 general and there are many conservatives, 
 with none outstanding. In general, I believe 
 it can safely be said that it is the radicals 
 of the two groups who are doing the most 
 interesting work, the work most likely to 
 have cumulative influence. 
 
 These classifications are, of course, vague 
 and perhaps unjust. Frost, for example, is 
 conservative as regards form but radical as 
 regards matter ; he imports into poetry much 
 that would have seemed unpoetic ten years 
 ago. 
 
 Whether the romantic or the realistic will 
 dominate, it is almost impossible to say. Do 
 we want poetry to deal exclusively with a 
 world of the imagination, a world of illusion 
 and beauty? Or do we want to have it deal 
 with man as he really is, illusions, disillusions 
 and all? ... Do we want work such as 
 the Imagists give us, sensory phenomena 
 presented discretely, unrelated to any cog 
 nitive functions, vividly descriptive, pri 
 marily gtatic, or work which aims primar 
 ily at an understanding of man? 
 
10 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 Personally, I should like to see a fusion of 
 the two: to see the romantic method color 
 ful, sensuous, illusion-making employed 
 for a realistic end. I should like to see poetry 
 become scientific in its search for truth, pen- 
 erating, destructive, comprehensive; not so 
 much desiring to find beauty as to be beauty, 
 no matter what be the subject treated. Two 
 cardinal principles should govern it: it must 
 tell the truth, and it must be a work of art. 
 
 Of Mr. Witter Bynner, Mr. Untermeyer 
 has written that "he can get magic and meta 
 physics out of a Pullman smoker." It is in 
 teresting to note that he finds our present 
 renascence of poetry a reaction against the 
 influence of the nineties. 
 
 
 
 There is a new vigor in poetry, he 
 writes. As I see it, the people are respond 
 ing to a renewal of humaness among the 
 poets; human subjects, natural language 
 and vital impulses. We have been slowly 
 emerging from the aesthetic vanity of the 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 11 
 
 nineties toward poetic health again ; and the 
 public is quick now to perceive it. The pat 
 ter of the so-called "schools" of poetry will 
 do no harm, I think; for they will freshen 
 and diversify technique. But they are a 
 side-show. And the three rings in the main 
 tent are beauty, vigor and common-sense. 
 
 Mr. Will Levington Comfort s letter is 
 of peculiar interest in establishing the pro 
 pinquity of the viewpoint of the younger 
 generation of American novelists to that of 
 the younger group of American poets. His 
 comment upon the effect of the moving pic 
 ture on the form and content of our fiction 
 is worthy of serious consideration. 
 
 A fresh and different vitality is manifest 
 to-day in North American literature. At 
 various points around us, dealing with words, 
 colors, and the subtler tools, are active young 
 workmen who, for the first time, in the full 
 est sense, may be termed "North American." 
 
 The first characteristic of this new element, 
 
12 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 these young, flexible and very vigorous 
 minds, is that they are workmen not 
 laborers, not professionals, not primarily 
 artists in anything, unless it be life but 
 workers first, and after that, novelists, poets, 
 musicians, painters or politicians. 
 
 They are not competitors. They have not 
 forgotten the warm side of justice, but they 
 knew well the stern face of compassion 
 they know that it takes Christ and anti- 
 Christ to make a world. They are neither 
 modest nor egotistical, being for the most 
 part busy and intensely alive, which implies 
 joy. They are not responsible for their 
 parents. 
 
 The great love-story has not been written. 
 The few great love-stories of the world have 
 to be pieced out by the imagination. We 
 find that we have been told that they are 
 great love-stories, but they do not stand ex 
 amination. The classic form will not do for 
 the New Age. There is to be a new lan 
 guage for literary handling. It may be 
 called American, to distinguish it from 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 13 
 
 lish in the accepted form. It is to be brisk, 
 brief, brave and ebullient to meet the mod 
 ern modification all must reckon with the 
 screen-trained mind. 
 
 American-mindedness, of itself now, would 
 never accept a great love-story. It would 
 be called "sentimental," if not lascivious. 
 The average American is an impossible lover, 
 making it incident to business. The real and 
 the sham are equally above him. He would 
 not know when to be exalted or when to be 
 ashamed. He thinks his own passion is evil, 
 and thus makes it so. The great love-story 
 can only be written with creative dynamics, 
 and can only be accepted by the few of cor 
 responding receptivity. There is nothing 
 soft about true romance. Some passionate 
 singer of the New Age will likely appear 
 right soon, his story to have the full redo 
 lence and lustre of the heart, his emotions 
 thoroughbred, his literary quality at the same 
 time crystalline with Reality. 
 
 The big adventure-story has not been done 
 so far. The day of guns, horses and redskins 
 
14 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 is over. Photoplays have developed such fic 
 tion resources to the limit, proving to those 
 writers who were born to be modern that 
 their full tales can never be shown on a flat 
 surface. There will be undercurrents, over 
 tones, invisible movements, tensions upon the 
 reader, not only from between the lines, but 
 between words. The story-teller of the New 
 Age may handle his theme in words of one 
 syllable, but his tale will have an intensity 
 scarcely to be explained only responded to 
 by minds which cannot be satisfied by two- 
 plane production minds which demand 
 more of life than the camera sees. 
 
 The real war-story of today, even for to 
 morrow, ought to arrive soon. This is an 
 age for an epic. Some keen and compre 
 hensive mind will arise a literary genius who 
 will include the patriot, the anarchist, the 
 poet, dramatist, humanitarian, theosophist, 
 dreamer, judge and statesman and tell the 
 Story of War, a tale of trenches, kings and 
 arms; blood, heroism and monstrous greed; 
 vast, far-reaching causes and the slow, inev- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 15 
 
 itable hell of effects told from a viewpoint 
 so inclusive that thrones are merely pawns 
 in a Planetary Game. 
 
 Inclusion is the first business of the writer 
 who is truly allied with the modern element. 
 Propagandists do not fill the picture. Yes 
 terday the knockers and agnostics today 
 the specialists and one-sided enthusiasts to 
 morrow the embodiers, the includers. Whit 
 man is the arch-type for builders to come; 
 Nietzsche the master-wrecker; these are the 
 guidons of the New Generation the pillar 
 of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night. 
 
 Mr. Max Eastman, editor of "The 
 Masses," poet and critic, wrote some years 
 ago an illuminating and beautiful book called 
 "The Enjoyment of Poetry." His contri 
 bution analyzes the new movement in our 
 life which he believes our art will record. It 
 may be added that in his latest book, "Jour 
 nalism vs. Art," he has voiced his disagree 
 ment with the champions of the free verse 
 forms. And, therefore, with respect to his 
 
16 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 theory of poetic form, he ranks among the 
 conservatives. But his criticism of the con 
 tent of contemporary art proclaims him a 
 revolutionist. 
 
 I think that the first three paragraphs of 
 my review of a book by Rebecca West are 
 an answer to the question you ask in your 
 letter. I do not suppose there has ever 
 been an age when there was not a "new move 
 ment in literature." And, as to literary 
 movements as such, I am not so much inter 
 ested in them. But there is certainly a 
 movement in our life today which will be re 
 flected in literature as contemporary life 
 always is, and I think these paragraphs in 
 dicate my feeling as to what it is and what 
 relation my work bears to it. 
 
 "Every full-blooded young person has in 
 his arteries a certain amount of scorn. Lit 
 erary young persons have usually directed 
 this scorn against philistinism, the middle 
 class monotonies, and any provincial obtuse- 
 ness to those finer values discriminated by 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 17 
 
 the cultured and by those who possess Art. 
 But in our day the full-blooded young per 
 sons have got their scorn directed against a 
 more important evil against the ground- 
 plan of money-competition built on indus 
 trial slavery which orders our civilization and 
 makes all our judgments of value, even the 
 most cultured, impure. Indeed, we suspect 
 everything that is called culture we suspect 
 it of the taint of pecuniary elegance. We 
 have armed our critical judgment with Thor- 
 stein Veblen s "Theory of the Leisure Class" 
 perhaps the greatest book of our day, for 
 it combines a new flavor in literature with a 
 new and great truth in science. This theory 
 has taught us how to see through "culture." 
 We know something about knowledge. We 
 have been "put wise" to sophistication. 
 
 Moreover, we have tasted an affirmative 
 and universal sympathy with all realities of 
 life that lies far out and beyond culture in 
 the mind s adventure. We have drunk of 
 the universe in Walt Whitman s poetry. 
 
 And of "Art," too, we have our intolerant 
 
18 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 suspicion a suspicion grounded in the fact 
 that the whole standard of judgment by 
 which art is judged was evolved in the parlor 
 play of a petty minority of the race left idle 
 by the tragic and real bitterness of life s 
 experiences accorded to the majority who 
 never spoke. We have read Tolstoy s great 
 mad indictment of European art. We have 
 made ready to knife the whole canvas, if 
 necessary, in favor of a coarser and more 
 universal reality. That is the direction in 
 which our blood is coursing. We are filled 
 with scorn, as every young builder is filled 
 with scorn. But our scorn makes of us rank 
 and democratic revolutionists instead of 
 over-exquisite and rather priggish aesthet 
 
 ics." 
 
 Mr. Donald Evans disagrees with Mr. 
 Bynner as to the ancestry of our contem 
 porary literature. He finds it to be the 
 direct heir of the movement of the nineties. 
 His own work has usually been considered 
 as being one of the most radical contribu- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 19 
 
 tions to modern poetry; he, however, places 
 it midway between the radical and conserva 
 tive currents. 
 
 There is undoubtedly a new spirit in 
 American literature, but I should dislike 
 calling it a "movement," because a "move 
 ment" is perforce self-conscious and artifi 
 cial, and I believe this new spirit is sponta 
 neous and unconscious. It is best summed 
 up, I think, as the "voice of youth." Liter 
 ature today has burst the shackles of middle 
 and old age which controlled it absolutely 
 during the last half of the last century. To 
 day the writer wins a hearing in his twenties 
 while his mind is still growing, expanding, 
 and thus his work has all the charm of fresh 
 ness, illusion, contradiction, error, doubt, 
 faith, intolerance, impatience in short, all 
 the charm of youth itself with always the 
 promise of finer, larger things to come. 
 
 The new spirit s most conspicuous ideal, I 
 should say, is a healthy realism, a striving to 
 express all sides of life, the "good and the 
 bad and the best and the worst." 
 
20 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 It is the true child of the brave and bat- 
 tlesome "Yellow 90s" of England. 
 
 Naturally, to me, poetry seems the most 
 important current. Never has poetry had 
 a greater role in letters. In the last two 
 years almost as many volumes of verse as 
 novels have been published. 
 
 My own work is in thorough sympathy 
 with the new spirit, steering, I fancy, a 
 rather middle course between the radicals 
 and the conservatives. 
 
 John Erskine, Professor of English at 
 Columbia University, is widely known as a 
 poet and critic. He draws an interesting 
 comparison between the attitude toward life 
 of our contemporary poets and the novelists 
 of the last fifty years. And his criticism of 
 our literature is incisive. His essay, "The 
 New Poetry," in "The Yale Review" for 
 January, 1917, is a comprehensive study of 
 the spirit of recent American poetry. 
 
 Here are my answers to your questions: 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 21 
 
 I believe a new movement is showing itself 
 in poetry today. I find it not only in the 
 remarkable output of free verse and other 
 kinds of verse, but in the growing attention 
 to American life as a subject for poetry. 
 It seems to me that the poets are taking some 
 such interest in the world about them as the 
 novelists have been taking in the last half 
 century, and this new movement must be 
 very largely an advantage to our literature. 
 The attention to free verse I think fairly 
 negligible that is, I don t much care 
 whether a man writes in free verse or in some 
 other form, provided he writes poetry. It is 
 perhaps unfortunate that so much attention 
 has been attracted to the form in which verse 
 is written today, when the question of the 
 subject matter is so important. My own 
 verse, I hope, shows an interest in what peo 
 ple are thinking and feeling today. It is 
 meant, at least, to express the best thoughts 
 and feelings that I have. My adverse crit 
 icism of American literature today would be 
 that though there is this improvement in the 
 
22 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 attention to life about us, there is still a feel 
 ing among the writers that literature need 
 not be particularly thoughtful nor scholarly. 
 Too much of our writing might be dismissed, 
 I think, with the hard verdict of "empty- 
 headed and shallow-hearted." The poets 
 who ever amounted to anything in the world 
 shared deeply in the ideas and in the feelings 
 of their time. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke is a poet, 
 dramatist and critic, whose "Sonnets of a 
 Portrait Painter" received wide recognition. 
 In this letter, and in the essay which follows 
 it, is recorded the faith of one who, although 
 writing in the traditional forms, has shared 
 deeply in the process of liberation which he 
 describes, and is thoroughly informed of the 
 new spirit in poetry. 
 
 The only branch of American literature 
 about which I feel competent to speak is 
 poetry. In that field there has been of late 
 so striking an awakening of interest that im- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 23 
 
 portant new work may be expected. The 
 manifest eccentricities and absurdities of the 
 "new schools" are certainly no worse than 
 the banalities and sentimentalities of the old 
 ones ; in fact, the vigorous shock which some 
 of these aberrations have administered to the 
 moribund body of poetry is distinctly gal 
 vanizing. Goethe s words, used to describe 
 the ultra-romantic excesses of French liter 
 ature in his own day, apply accurately to 
 our present situation: "The extremes and 
 excrescences will gradually disappear; but 
 at last this great advantage will remain 
 besides a freer form, richer and more diversi 
 fied subjects will have been attained, and no 
 object of the broadest world and the most 
 manifold life will be any longer excluded 
 as unpoetical." We are today experiencing, 
 in poetry almost as markedly as in painting, 
 one of those periodic outbursts of unbridled 
 life by which alone can an art be kept from 
 hardening into a fossil. 
 
 English poetry of today is notoriously the 
 
24 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 scene of an opposition which to some ob 
 servers seems the rebellion of new life against 
 sterile and petrified forms, while to others 
 it appears as the menace of anarchy against 
 order and beauty. Almost as clearly marked 
 as in the economic world, the conservative 
 and the radical forces are at work. The mak 
 ing of poetry is the aim of both, but they 
 march under two irreconcilable banners. 
 One of these is the very modern attempt to 
 find some new and more flexible form in 
 which can be expressed accurately the hon 
 est and unsentimental poetry of the modern 
 mind; the other is the effort to invest the 
 raw vigor of our modernity with that glamor 
 of formal beauty which marks the classic 
 tradition of the older poets. Between these 
 two camps a merry war is waging; and it is 
 an open question whether the impatience of 
 the Revolutionists toward the Traditional 
 ists, or the distaste of the Traditionalists for 
 the Revolutionists, is the greater. 
 
 In any examination of the Revolutionary 
 poetry, it is best to put aside this little quar- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 25 
 
 rel and to approach the new poems as one 
 would a theatre willing to be entertained, 
 but not determined to be. Some readers will 
 take up the modern work with minds haunted 
 by the ghosts of poets who died before the 
 new poets were born; and these will find it 
 difficult to regard the birth of poetry as co 
 incident with the origin of any modern cult. 
 In fact, many lovers of the old tradition ap 
 pear to have great trouble in keeping good- 
 tempered in the face of some of the claims 
 made by the advanced poets. It would be 
 well if these apoplectic critics would remind 
 themselves that an open mind is acceptable 
 to God and profitable to man. As they con 
 front the novel and sometimes startling at 
 tempts of radical enthusiasts, they might ad 
 vantageously recall history and be a little 
 humble. The revolts of each rising genera 
 tion have always seemed to each passing gen 
 eration like perverse breaches of immutable 
 laws; yet time has often made it clear that 
 it was only against the very mutable and 
 sometimes stupid misinterpretation of laws 
 
26 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 that the rebellion of the younger wills was 
 directed. Thus the pathetic comedy goes on 
 from generation to generation; and the old 
 past fights bitterly against the rising tide of 
 the young future. May heaven spare us the 
 humiliation of acting so dull a part in so 
 grotesque a drama. May we be ready to wel 
 come all in the new poetry that is beautiful 
 even though it come dressed in an unfa 
 miliar beauty! 
 
 On the other hand it would be a pity to 
 abandon completely the attitude of the skep 
 tic mind of the mind from Missouri. It is 
 not wholly a sign of senility to demand evi 
 dence that the new is good before we discard 
 the old. Change is, indeed, the condition of 
 growth, in art as in life. But not all motion 
 in the arts is progress, nor are all movements 
 to be regarded as Crusades toward the Holy 
 Sepulchre. In the arts, as in life, there are 
 many blind alleys, many meaningless expe 
 ditions ; and no one wants to be tricked into 
 adherence to one of these. Faith in the ne 
 cessity of progress need not drive the enthu- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 27 
 
 siast to such a pitch of desperation that he 
 joins every Coxey s Army that marches 
 shouting through the streets. 
 
 Whatever we may think of the new poetry, 
 we must perceive in it four sharply marked 
 elements. These are the demand for com 
 plete metrical freedom; the insistence on 
 hard actuality of images ; the adoption of an 
 attitude of humor, irony, or grotesqueness in 
 even the most serious poems; and an abso 
 lute frankness and shamelessness as to the 
 content of the poet s work. 
 
 Of these elements it is the metrical free 
 dom that stands out most obviously. The 
 extremists of the new school look with dis 
 trust on the established verse-forms. They 
 feel that the constraint of any regular metri 
 cal system is an intolerable prison to the 
 spirit of the poet. Following the example 
 of recent French poets, they demand that 
 the integrity of the poet s meaning be poured 
 into song whose cadences are born solely of 
 the moment s emotion and are not respon 
 sible for conformity to any recurrent order 
 
28 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 of rhyme or rhythm. Such a theory pro 
 duces verse whose lines are of irregular 
 length, whose dominant movement may 
 change at any moment, and from which 
 rhyme is usually absent. At its worst this 
 verse is an abomination; at its best it is a 
 very subtle medium for the expression of 
 certain kinds of feeling. 
 
 As all educated Revolutionists admit, 
 though the name vers libre is new, the thing 
 itself is not. In fact, it is a very ancient 
 thing, which has been used admirably by the 
 most classic of all the English poets, Milton. 
 In the Choruses of Samson Agonistes he 
 employs such free verse as no modern Revo 
 lutionary poet is likely to surpass. Hence 
 if we protest against free verse, we set our 
 selves counter not only to the modernists of 
 today but also to the classicists of yester 
 day. As Milton saw, regular rhythms do 
 not fill every need. Not all themes fit them 
 selves into conventionalized sound-patterns. 
 Sometimes, as in Samson Agonistes, an ef 
 fect of peculiar dryness and hardness is 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 29 
 
 wanted which regular verse would be unable 
 to supply. Also there are cases in which 
 life strikes the emotion of the poet in broken 
 flashes in swift chaotic fragmentary per 
 ceptions; and to record these, free verse is 
 an unsurpassed medium. For all these rea 
 sons there is no sense whatever in the popu 
 lar objections that have been raised to the 
 free verse of the modern poet. 
 
 It is only with those who proclaim free 
 verse to be the sole possible poetic medium 
 that one has a right to quarrel. There are 
 such poets ; and in their attempt to create a 
 cult of free verse they make themselves very 
 ridiculous. Because the carpenter finds the 
 hatchet useful for certain kinds of work is 
 hardly a reason for throwing the saw out of 
 the window. Milton knew very much better. 
 Though he used free verse when he chose, he 
 employed the regular metres and the son 
 net in a manner that has not been surpassed. 
 Great artist that he was, he adapted his me 
 dium to his purpose. He knew what all 
 poets will be wise to recognize today; that 
 
30 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 certain effects in poetry are wholly impos 
 sible without the use of regular rhythms and 
 rhyme. 
 
 The reason for this fact is derived from 
 the very nature of the art. It is based on 
 the absolute necessity of carrying the lulled 
 spirit of the reader on waves of recurrent 
 sound into a state of suspended conscious 
 ness a kind of visionary trance in which the 
 mind, deaf for a moment to the distractions 
 of the world around it, will see singly and 
 solely the dream which the poet puts be 
 fore it. The emotion-heightening, hypnotic 
 power of regular rhythms and recurrent 
 rhymes is in many instances the whole basis 
 of that peculiar somnambulistic effect which 
 is the special magic of poetry. Emotion is 
 the secret of it all; and some emotions an 
 swer to the call of rhyme and rhythm as to al 
 most nothing else. Rhythm seizes the thread 
 of one s thought as might a current, and in 
 tertwines with it, and draws it down into re 
 mote subterranean caverns of the spirit un- 
 visited by the everyday consciousness. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 31 
 
 The sole debatable question that arises is: 
 How regular must the rhythm be to pro 
 duce the desired trance-like effect? When 
 the degree of trance desired is not very in 
 tense, as in poems that keep close to the sur 
 face-details of observed reality, the beat of 
 the verse may safely be reduced to a mini 
 mum. But when one wishes to lift the reader 
 into regions of passionate ecstasy and to 
 arouse the profoundest and most primal 
 emotions, one will have to resort to a more 
 powerful stimulus and carry the reader far 
 ther away from every-day reality on the flow 
 of these hypnotic waves of sound. For ironic 
 comments on the human comedy around us, 
 for pictures of the common stage on which 
 we do our little struttings, free verse is ad 
 mirable; but it will seldom serve to trans 
 port us to the heights of religious experi 
 ence, or to the depths of the black night of 
 the soul, or to the sun-swept levels of beauty- 
 drunken happiness. 
 
 It is, in fact, difficult to escape the feeling 
 that free verse, valuable though it is, is still 
 
32 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 in some obscure way incomplete verse a 
 rudimentary and not a final art-form. Many 
 poets will agree that one resorts to free verse 
 chiefly when what one has to say is not com 
 pletely crystallized, or when one s emotion 
 is not at its most intense pitch, or when one 
 wishes to note down a series of impressions 
 that have not yet fully combined into one 
 concentrated pattern. For one case in which 
 free verse has been used as Milton used it, 
 
 
 
 out of deliberate and conscious choice, 
 there are a thousand cases in which it has 
 been employed solely because the writer had 
 not carried the inner processes of compo 
 sition far enough to poetize his material com 
 pletely. When the mind is a blaze of sudden 
 revelation, and the poet s theme glows into 
 thorough transparency of white heat, he will 
 usually find that what he has to say flows 
 rapidly and perfectly into the smooth mould 
 of regular verse-forms ; but when the inten 
 sity of his impulse is a little lower, and all 
 kinds of comments, reflections, minor ob 
 servations, and clever plays of word and 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 33 
 
 thought are mixed with his truly poetical 
 material, then he can give much more com 
 plete and appropriate expression to his idea 
 in the less intense rhythms of free verse. 
 
 The new poets have made no mistake in 
 using free verse. Their only error has been 
 in committing themselves to it with too blind 
 an exclusiveness. 
 
 Beyond the matter of rhythm lies another 
 feature of the new poetry that very inter 
 esting theory of writing called Imagism. 
 The Imagists attempt to present to the 
 reader a clear, exact, sharp picture of ob 
 jects and episodes; after this, they allow 
 the reader himself to evoke from this presen 
 tation those comments, reflections, emotions, 
 and overtones which form so large a part 
 of ordinary poetry. The Imagist would not 
 say "mournful waves" or "bleak coast"; he 
 would refuse to comment thus: he would 
 prefer "lead-gray waves" and "splintered 
 coast." He would attempt to find the pre 
 cise word "which brings the effect of the 
 object to the reader as the writer saw it," 
 
34 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 and would present his scene with that im 
 personal interest in the scene itself which is 
 the peculiar characteristic of modern paint 
 ing. He would avoid all flamboyant words, 
 all set phrases, and keep his speech hard, 
 spare, clean-cut, economical. He would ex 
 press even the most general ideas, even the 
 most abstract conceptions, by means of the 
 concrete manner and the definite embodi 
 ment of beauty. 
 
 This theory has great fascination. The 
 practice of the theory by the professed Im- 
 agists has, however, been disappointing up 
 to the present time. The poems which fol 
 low are from among those which the Imagists 
 themselves praise. Here is one of the most 
 admired of Imagist productions, Oread, by 
 Mrs. Richard Aldington: 
 
 Whirl up sea 
 
 Whirl your pointed pines, 
 
 Splash your great pines 
 
 On our rocks, 
 
 Hurl your green over us, 
 
 Cover us with your pools of fir. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 35 
 
 There is, indeed, a certain vividness of 
 tumult expressed in this likening of the 
 wind-tossed sea to a wind-tossed pine-forest. 
 But it seems attenuated, over-stressed; and 
 such a minutely treated theme for a poem, 
 after all! Surely a morbid fear of elabora 
 tion has impelled the writer to resort to such 
 a mere adumbration of her thought. It sug 
 gests an unwholesome veneration for even 
 the most fragmentary of her perceptions. 
 Compare it with any of the short poems of 
 that supreme lyricist, William Blake, and 
 observe how thin it seems. 
 
 Here is another Imagist poem by Mr. 
 Ezra Pound, called April; it is almost mean 
 ingless because of this same parsimony : 
 
 Three spirits came to me 
 
 And drew me apart 
 
 To where the olive boughs 
 
 Lay stripped upon the ground : 
 
 Pale carnage beneath bright mist. 
 
 The principle of hard conciseness has here 
 
36 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 been carried too far. It is the method of 
 Japanese poetry reduced to madness. But 
 here is an incomparably better and perhaps 
 a more characteristic specimen of Imagism, 
 by Miss Amy Lowell; it is called White and 
 Green. 
 
 Hey! My daffodil-crowned, 
 Slim and without sandals ! 
 As the sudden spurt of flame upon darkness 
 So my eyeballs are startled with you, 
 Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees, 
 Light runner through tasseled orchards. 
 You are an almond flower unsheathed 
 Leaping and flickering between the budded 
 branches. 
 
 Thus the Imagist attempts to give you a 
 clear, sharp word-picture of the thing seen, 
 without making any attempt to tell you what 
 emotions this thing evokes in him or should 
 evoke in you. He hopes, by presenting just 
 the right details, to make you do your own 
 feeling, and to convey to you the implica- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 37 
 
 tions of the scene described with a sharpness 
 all the greater because of his withholding of 
 his own comments. Of course, the Imagist 
 is not unique in this aim. There is a perfect 
 example of Imagism in Burns line : 
 
 The white moon is setting behind the white 
 wave, 
 
 and in Keats : 
 
 The sedge is withered by the lake 
 And no birds sing. 
 
 In the words of these poets, however, the 
 Imagistic passages stand in intelligible rela 
 tion to greater wholes ; they are merely the 
 bits out of which the artist composes his wide 
 mosaic. The real Imagists, on the other 
 hand, too often forget the whole for the part; 
 they too often are content to put down vivid 
 little trifles as if they were completed pic 
 tures. Many Imagist poems are merely 
 such fragmentary bits of color, such mo 
 mentary sketches, as a great artist puts 
 
38 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 down in his note-book for later use in a 
 larger composition. 
 
 There is a third element very strikingly 
 present in the new poetry: this is its revolt 
 against sweetness and prettiness. It appears 
 sometimes as brutality, sometimes as irony, 
 sometimes as grotesqueness. As one might 
 stamp, swearing furiously, out of some over- 
 scented boudoir, so many of the Revolu 
 tionary poets give expression to their con 
 tempt for the softness and sugariness of the 
 older poetry. This is not an altogether new 
 phenomenon; it has occurred before in all 
 the arts as a sign of vigor and fresh life. It 
 offends the godly, but it wakes them up. It 
 is one of the healthiest signs in our modern 
 work. Sometimes it takes a less violent 
 form, as it did in the work of a poet who 
 was in other respects a Revolutionist, 
 Rupert Brooke, and becomes an insistence 
 on the ugly, the humiliating, the repulsive 
 aspects of life. Tired of high-flown idealiza 
 tions and hothouse bouquets, Brooke shows 
 us Helen of Troy in old age. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 39 
 
 a scold 
 
 Haggard with virtue. 
 
 Oft she weeps gummy-eyed and impotent; 
 Her dry shanks twitch at Paris mumbled 
 name. 
 
 This kind of thing has its tonic value; it is 
 the other half of the story, the dark of the 
 moon. And though it would be a pity if the 
 vigor of the new movement spent itself 
 wholly in grotesques of this variety, they 
 show a healthy skepticism, a healthy con 
 tempt for the humiliating position of the 
 human animal; and their place is just as 
 legitimate as is that of the gargoyles grin 
 ning down from cathedral buttresses. 
 
 Nevertheless, some critics have abused Mr. 
 Edgar Lee Masters for the gloom and sav 
 agery of his Spoon River portraits ; and the 
 other day a certain reviewer took a book to 
 task because it was not "heartening," and 
 because the dramatis personas of the lyrics 
 were all "wise and bitter and weary and gen 
 erally disillusioned and disillusionizing." As 
 
40 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 if it were necessary for a poet to write with 
 a pie-smile on his face! One writes of life 
 as one sees it; and the new writers, impa 
 tient with the shallow optimism of 
 
 God s in his heaven, 
 
 All s right with the world, 
 
 are trying to set down their sense of the 
 confusions and degradations and bafflements 
 of life, as well as of its peaks in Darien. Mr. 
 Masters or Mr. Carl Sandburg or Mr. Ed 
 win Arlington Robinson would produce a 
 fine absurdity, indeed, if they attempted to 
 write with that confident optimism which is 
 perfectly natural to Mr. Vachel Lindsay, 
 and which is the true and proper way for 
 Mr. Lindsay to write. But Mr. Lindsay s 
 work would have little ralue if its cheerful 
 ness were its only or its finest quality. 
 
 This leads one to the last characteristic of 
 the new poetry: its intellectual frankness. 
 Until one stops to think about it, one does 
 not realize how extensive the change in this 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 41 
 
 matter has been. Fifty years ago the tra 
 dition of English poetry was simply over 
 grown with a thicket of Victorian pruderies 
 and reticences. The hypocritical sentiment 
 ality of Tennyson s Arthurian ideal lay upon 
 Mid- Victorian English like a blight; and 
 few writers except Swinburne, who cared 
 not a fig for devil, man, or Queen Victoria, 
 dared make beauty out of the soul s or the 
 body s nakedness. Now all this is past. To 
 day it is possible for the sincere artist in 
 verse to write of absolutely anything. He 
 is no longer limited to that small seg 
 ment of life which might have been con 
 sidered proper for the ! sight of the Mid- Vic 
 torian young lady. He has once more the 
 virile freedom of the Elizabethans, and may 
 without fear or shame depict whatsoever 
 aspect of life seems to his eyes significant or 
 curious or beautiful. 
 
 In future years it will doubtless not be 
 possible for the dispassionate critic to take 
 the new poetry quite as seriously as, today, 
 it takes itself. Such an observer may grow 
 
42 THE t YOUNG IDEA 
 
 a little bewildered and even amused as he 
 surveys our Schools and Movements the 
 Imagists and Vorticists and Spectricists and 
 Patagonians and a Choric School, and 
 Heaven only knows how many others. He 
 will perhaps wonder wherein the revolution 
 ary element of all these Revolutions lay, for 
 he will see clearly that all the elements of 
 our new poetry are in fact very old elements. 
 But if he stops there, he will be a very bad 
 critic indeed. 
 
 Something has really happened to us. The 
 effort toward freedom from dead conven 
 tions, displayed in the new poetry, has a 
 significance greater than any actual accom 
 plishment that the movement has so far pro 
 duced. There is a genuine spiritual liber 
 ation behind even the most fantastic of the 
 new poems, and an honest effort to explore, 
 to invent, to widen the boundaries of the art. 
 Though the technical results have been so 
 far negligible, the moral results have been 
 large. Today men are writing more hon 
 estly, more spontaneously, more vigorously, 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 43 
 
 than at any time during the last quarter- 
 century; they are writing joyfully and 
 shamelessly; they recognize no authority that 
 cannot justify itself, no dogmas that are not 
 lighted by living faith. They are trying to 
 express real feelings and to devise patterns 
 of verse appropriate to this expression. 
 
 A few years ago, men with no deep power 
 over either thought or form were busily fill 
 ing the magazines with sweet characterless 
 rubbish. Since the death of the great Vic 
 torian poets, they had used the whole Ten- 
 nysonian machinery in a facile, spiritless, 
 over-ornamented way, without any of that 
 underlying greatness of spirit which made 
 this rather absurd machinery forgivable in 
 the hands of Tennyson. People had come 
 to think that regular rhythms, rhymes, and 
 a good deal of talk about "azure argosies" 
 and "hillside vernal" and "argent pano 
 plies" and "light supernal" constituted the 
 badge of the modern poet; and that fine 
 poetry had really died with Queen Victoria. 
 
 Then came the Revolution. It came as a 
 
44 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 part of that general revolution which has 
 been working upheaval in all the arts. Our 
 day has seen every artist, be he musician, 
 painter, sculptor, or poet, forced to take 
 stock of his soul s goods and to look around 
 him with fresh eyes. We have seen in music 
 the growth of a new order of composition 
 an order in which the formal patterns of 
 Mozart and Beethoven seem shattered into 
 strange discontinuous tones, imperfect satis 
 factions of the waiting ear, discords as haunt 
 ing as they are unexpected. In the field of 
 painting, men whom we can no longer dis 
 miss with a nod as charlatans, men like 
 Cezanne and Matisse, have been abandon 
 ing the hard-won classic perfection of Titian 
 and Raphael, and have been insisting that 
 the painter must return to the freshness and 
 integrity of his own emotional perception 
 of nature, in all its starkness and crudity. 
 
 Even so in poetry, this revolution has 
 worked in salutary ways. It shattered the 
 illusion that all the poets were dead, and 
 that the pseudo-Tennysonian poetry of the 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 45 
 
 magazines remained as their sole relique on 
 earth. The Revolutionists demanded true 
 feeling and appropriate expression instead 
 of empty rhetoric. They assaulted the great. 
 They tried preposterous experiments. They 
 made the world feel that there was, after 
 all, dynamite and a volcano at the heart of 
 poetry. For this, let us give them profound 
 thanks. 
 
 But after we have given them this, their 
 intensity of effort need not make us feel that 
 the stars of our youth have gone out. These 
 insurgencies have not touched the glory of 
 Milton or Shelley or Shakespeare. The old 
 beauty remains beautiful, though it does not 
 flatter us with the sense that we have dis 
 covered its secret for the first time today; 
 and the principles of aesthetic creation en 
 dure precisely as they were in the days of 
 King David the Psalmist. In the arts, lib 
 erty is not all, nor all-important. There is 
 no virtue in just the free and untrammeled 
 expression of our personalities, in free verse 
 or any other verse ; the root of the matter is 
 
46 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 to discover and use that medium, that pat 
 tern and rhythm, into which our personal 
 emotion can be poured and there take on the 
 lineaments of an impersonal and intelligible 
 beauty. It is of very little consequence if 
 you or I cry out our hearts; it is of great 
 consequence if we can turn our hearts cry 
 into the measures of a perfect song. In any 
 art, nothing ultimately matters but the 
 aesthetic element; and the aesthetic element 
 is not necessarily inherent in even the most 
 sincere and spontaneous outpouring of feel 
 ing. Liberty from formal restraint is there 
 fore worthless unless it leads to some further 
 and finer discovery of formal law. The chief 
 danger of the new poetry is that it often 
 seems in its practice to forget this positively 
 platitudinous axiom. Form! it is every 
 thing. Not in the stupid academic sense of 
 precedented models, but in the sense of that 
 fine harmony between the artist s meaning 
 and his manner which is the parallel of those 
 rare human moments when there is achieved 
 a real concordance of body and soul. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 47 
 
 Mr. Vachel Lindsay was among the van 
 guard of the prophets of revolt in our poetry. 
 His "Adventures While Preaching the Gos 
 pel of Beauty," a record of his vagabond 
 journey through the Middle West, records 
 his faith in the influence of poetry upon the 
 common man, a faith which he has put to the 
 test of proof. 
 
 He says: There is a wave of interest in 
 verse going across the country. America is 
 beginning to professionalize, institutionalize 
 and nationalize a new group of laureates. 
 
 The Century Magazine for March, 1916, 
 said: "There are one hundred poets in Amer 
 ica today, excellent craftsmen, vivid adven 
 turers, known and unknown." 
 
 Some of these people have been writing 
 for a generation. The public, however, re 
 fused until today to read any of their books. 
 Only one excuse was offered. The verse 
 of these poets was not "great." 
 
 It was a particularly cruel and unreason 
 able standard, when applied to the village 
 
48 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 poet. His rhyme was sometimes printed by 
 the most fastidious magazines. That should 
 have been enough for a standing in the home 
 town. Certainly it was not required of the 
 young fellow with a law school education 
 that he have ten years of emenince as Chief 
 Justice of the Supreme Court before he be 
 trusted with the local legal business. Yet 
 many of the hundred who are now emerging 
 were these village poets, hung, drawn and 
 quartered by the Christian Endeavor So 
 ciety, the Y. M. C. A., the Labor Union and 
 the Country Club alike, because, as it was 
 implied, they could not prove themselves 
 Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Whitman 
 combined. 
 
 But the real reason of the taboo was that 
 the tyrannous majorities disliked all poetry. 
 There were two causes for this. First: 
 American fidgits. Second: the way verse 
 was taught in the public schools of the last 
 generation. The teachers did not many of 
 them love the art. It was the custom to use 
 it as a grindstone, as a sharpener of the wits* 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 49 
 
 This gift of the gods, whose name for little 
 children should have been as springtime and 
 wildflowers, became in the eyes of the Amer 
 ican babies a mysterious rack on which the 
 mind was tortured. Every poem was trans 
 formed into a prose exercise in reasoning or 
 an experiment in scanning. The child was 
 always taught to read past the rhyme and 
 ignore it. He was shown the alleged won 
 derful trick of stopping for breath at the 
 middle of the line, and reading past the 
 rhyme as fast as possible. Yet, generally 
 speaking, in every well-read poem there 
 should be as long a pause as is given for a 
 comma, wherever there is a rhyme. The 
 child who singsonged the poem was the mar 
 tyr of poetry. He was absolutely right and 
 he was reproved for it. 
 
 The only poems allowed to penetrate the 
 baby souls of that generation were the class 
 ics of the playground, "London Bridge Is 
 Falling Down," "King William Was King 
 James Son," and "As We Go Round the 
 Mulberry Bush," sung in concert and acted 
 
50 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 by sturdy volunteers at recess. And no one 
 in America appeared to know that was 
 poetry. Poetry was something to pull a 
 long face over, and give the name of the 
 meter. 
 
 The village poet should see that the entire 
 teaching of verse in the nearest public school 
 be related as closely as possible to "London 
 Bridge," "King William," and the "Mul 
 berry Bush," and the child encouraged to 
 sing-song his favorite poems with growing 
 elaboration through the years. The village 
 poet will find this generation of teachers 
 quite willing to co-operate. Let the chil 
 dren go deeply into the cadences of "Hia 
 watha," Poe s "Bells," and "Horatius at the 
 Bridge" and "How They Brought the Good 
 News from Ghent to Aix," and, if possible, 
 make them into their own folk dances. I 
 have found this very easy to do with chil 
 dren from six to eighteen, and, of course, 
 with older students. 
 
 The college student should go deeply into 
 the mystery of unrhymed melodies, and 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 51 
 
 evolve any procedure that will make the 
 printed rhythms real. The new free verse 
 requires an ear that is first elaborately 
 trained in conventional rhythms. The people 
 that like it best are apt to be those who love 
 the old poets. 
 
 .Young physicians and lawyers have empty 
 offices the first few years, sometimes many 
 years, and the versifier need not expect an 
 easier time. Whatever the village poet s 
 ostensible profession, school teacher, editor, 
 ditch-digger, let him fight for local recog 
 nition as a minstrel, in any dignified way, 
 and not wait for a hearing to come to him. 
 
 And, like the preacher, let the versifier 
 learn to vocalize his message. Young di 
 vines, delivering their first sermons, act as 
 poets generally do all their lives when read 
 ing their works. Every one gives a sigh of 
 relief when the exercises are over. But here 
 is a difference. The preacher tries again, 
 because society expects it of him, and he ex 
 pects it of himself. The most brilliant poets 
 go on whispering forever, claiming special 
 
52 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 privileges, while there is scarcely a cross 
 roads pastor or small town lawyer of mid 
 dle age but can make a fairly acceptable 
 presentation of such a message as he has, and 
 hold three hundred with reasonable com 
 mand. 
 
 "Getting into the magazines" is a diploma 
 for which the bard should be thankful. It 
 is worth striving for. But though the poets 
 have been in the magazines all these years, 
 no one for a generation has, as it were, read 
 the diploma. Or, to put it another way, 
 the accepted verses became end-page orna 
 ments, by no means taken with the same hu 
 man interest as the prose before or after. 
 And as to remembering the name or style 
 of a poet from one month to the next, that 
 was incredible. Even yet the typical news 
 stand magazines list their contributing prose 
 writers on the back of flaming colors, and 
 are discretely omitting their rhymers. 
 
 But Harriet Munroe, Edward J. Wheeler, 
 William Stanley Braithwaite, Jessie B. 
 Rittenhouse, Alice Corbin Henderson, Louis 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 53 
 
 Untermeyer, Alfred Kreymborg, Margaret 
 Anderson, Max Eastman, Lewellyn Jones, 
 Joyce Kilmer, William Marion Reedy, 
 Francis Hackett, with their special publica 
 tions, reviews, magazines, anthologies, social 
 groups or organized societies have served in 
 their various ways to lift the American poets 
 out of the class of mere diploma-getters, 
 stop-gaps, end-page decorators. Differing 
 in a legion of amazing ways, of all schools 
 of political and religious thought, these 
 critics agree in a passion for verse. They 
 have distributed living laurels of late, as 
 well as some limp laurels. Let those who 
 have hopes for the American soul, do them 
 honor for this crusade. 
 
 Now the lately-laurelled are in a sea of 
 endless technical discussion as to what the 
 pattern of a poem should be. It is as dreary 
 as the ancient scanning of the ward-school 
 pedagogues. But no one is attempting to 
 work out what is more important; the pat 
 tern of daily life for the American singer. 
 This is the thing the village poets must do. 
 
54 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 Certainly they may need Bohemia for a sea 
 son. They may find Art allies worth while 
 in Greenwich Village, that new East Au 
 rora, with its many new would-be Elbert 
 Hubbards. 
 
 But it does not behoove the true Jeffer- 
 sonian American to break his home-ties for 
 ever and stew away to nothing in the far 
 country simply because in his early youth 
 some one in authority praised one of his 
 songs. 
 
 Let the lately-crowned member of our 
 poetical one hundred accept his dead diplo 
 mas and his living laurels as well. Let his 
 henchmen insist to his neighbors that he is a 
 verse-designer duly certified by both the 
 official and the inspired authorities, and then 
 let him set out to make over the spirit of 
 his town. 
 
 Our most outstanding examples of the 
 local poet in the present decade are the late 
 James Whitcomb Kiley, who has given In 
 diana a soul, Edgar Lee Masters, laureate 
 of all down-state Illinois, Carl Sandburg, 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 55 
 
 laureate of Chicago, Robert Frost, laureate 
 of all north of Boston. 
 
 There are too many poets in Greenwich 
 Village. But there is room indeed for one 
 hundred poets, properly distributed. That 
 is but one for each million of inhabitants. 
 A potential audience of a million should be 
 spur enough for any man. It seems to me 
 some of our young fellows are rather baby 
 ish, the way they huddle together. Why 
 cannot they stand out alone and take the 
 real winds of America, instead of snuggling 
 in an imitation Latin quarter? There is 
 nothing in the cornfields to frighten real 
 men. It is not all important that America 
 have "Immortal Bards." Poetic immortal 
 ity is an utterly false aspiration for the critic 
 to awaken or for the unfortunate rhymer to 
 hug to his breast. It is as bad as newspaper 
 notoriety, as a motive. 
 
 And it is still more absurd, when the poet 
 does return to the village, for utterly un 
 known labor leaders, politicians, merchants 
 or bankers to insist that their local singer 
 
56 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 prove that he has won the admiration of the 
 unborn of the whole wide world for all the 
 ages to come, before he is privileged to sing 
 the local songs. The village poet, the home 
 town poet, should rather aspire to an old- 
 age veteranship, a standing that will count 
 with his friends and provoke his enemies, 
 we will say, at his seventieth birthday. He 
 should be equal parts William Allen White, 
 Eugene V. Debs and the nightingale. If he 
 desires immortality, let it be among the chil 
 dren of his personal friends in his home 
 town. I hope any reader of the Mirror who 
 knows a poet that needs this message will 
 not hesitate to clip it out and send it to him. 
 
 Miss Harriet Munroe is the editor of 
 "Poetry, a Magazine of Verse." A poet of 
 distinction herself, she has made the maga 
 zine a center for the new movement in the 
 art whose influence in bringing the work of 
 the new poets to the attention of the public 
 can hardly be overestimated. As her con 
 tribution to the discussion, she has chosen 
 these editorials from the magazine. 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 57 
 
 I am moved sometimes to wonder at the 
 narrowness of the field accorded to the poet 
 of conservative public taste, as compared 
 with the freer range granted today, as a 
 matter of course, to other artists. 
 
 The architect must pass with ease from 
 cottage to cathedral, from the village shop to 
 the skyscraper, and in doing so he may take 
 his choice of classic, renaissance, gothic, se 
 cession, or catch-as-catch-can. The painter 
 may paint figures, landscapes, marines, his 
 tories, mysteries, in any style that pleases 
 him, from Rembrandt to Cezanne, from Ci- 
 mabue to Kandinsky. Even the sculptor, 
 despite the bulk and hardness of his medium, 
 has the freedom of marble, bronze, terra 
 cotta, wax, wood, and many other sub 
 stances, and of all styles from the Chou dy 
 nasty to the futuristic dream in his own soul. 
 And the musician but his range is the 
 widest of all: he may compose song or sym 
 phony, fugue or rhapsody, opera, fantasia 
 or extravaganza; and to express all the fine 
 harmonies or riotous discords of his dream 
 
58 THE "YOUNG IDEA 
 
 he may call on hundreds of cunning instru 
 ments, singly or in miraculous unison, and 
 on the human voice as well, and compel them 
 to reveal him, whether he be Bach or De- 
 hussy, Wagner or Schoenberg. 
 
 And all these various extremes in these 
 various arts the public admits to its streets 
 and gardens, its theatres and concert halls, 
 its museums and (exhibitions. Indeed, the 
 more violent the extreme, the more eagerly 
 do we flock to see or hear, the more firmly 
 do we believe that we must see or hear in 
 order to bring our culture, or kultur, up to 
 date and meet the cannonading future with 
 a quiet mind. 
 
 But the poet, the English-writing poet of 
 today what does his potentially vast public 
 expect of him? His language circles the 
 globe ; his era is cosmopolitan, enormous, full 
 of newly released forces, of newly emerging 
 ideas. He lives in a world which is wound 
 in a net of rails and wires, of sea-ways and 
 air-ways, a world of far kinships and inhu 
 man wars, of intolerable poverty and 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 59 
 
 luxury, incredible fellowships and isolations. 
 
 To express the unprecedented magnifi 
 cence of this modern era, the unprecedented 
 emotion of this changing world to tell the 
 "tale of the tribe" to the future, and thereby 
 make the future as Homer and Dante and 
 Shakespeare have made us, the poet has but 
 one instrument words. To use this in 
 strument adequately, to make it resound far 
 and wide to the heights and depths of the 
 human spirit, the poet has need of the utmost 
 freedom and the utmost sympathy. He 
 needs as large and as eager an audience as 
 any confrere in the other arts, an audience 
 giving him the widest liberty of experience 
 in his effort to enrich his instrument, broaden 
 its range, and break down the technical bar 
 riers between his art and the far-flung mod 
 ern tribes whom it must address. 
 
 Yet, instead of such a co-operating public, 
 what does he find? He finds an indifferent 
 public, loath to listen at all, but demanding, 
 if it does listen, close observance of the well- 
 worn formulae of rhymes and iambs which 
 
60 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 Chaucer imported from France in his scorn 
 of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If a poet ven 
 tures out of this classic park he is at once 
 suspect ; the public gives him up as mentally 
 afflicted and leaves the paragraphers to diag 
 nose his malady. And even the more con 
 servative of his fellow-poets question his 
 right to batter down sacred walls. 
 
 Now, Poetry has frankly tried to widen 
 the poet s range, to question conventional 
 barriers, whether technical or spiritual, in 
 herited from the past, and help to bring the 
 modern poet face to face with the modern 
 world. We have printed not only odes and 
 sonnets, blank verse dramas and rhymed 
 pentameter narratives, but imagistic songs, 
 futuristic fugues, fantasies in vers libre, 
 rhapsodies in polyphonic prose any dash 
 for freedom which seemed to have life and 
 hope in it a fervor for movement and the 
 beauty of open spaces even if the goal was 
 vague and remote, or quite unattainable in 
 the distance. 
 
 And probably we shall go on in this reck- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 61 
 
 less course, whether the public gathers in 
 great numbers or not. A certain public 
 small, perhaps, but choice is gathering; of 
 that we receive indisputable evidence every 
 day. Even that satirical newspaper editor 
 who turns one of our fugues upside down, or 
 that other who gaily parodies imagism, or 
 that graver one who points at us the finger 
 of scorn all these are more or less con 
 sciously our friends, for they are helping the 
 public to WAKE UP, to observe that 
 something, through whatever illusions and 
 extravagances, is going on, that poetry is not 
 a dead art, but a living one, and that the 
 poet of today, like the liberator of long ago, 
 WILL BE HEARD. 
 
 The Book and Play Club had an "editors 
 night" last month, when spokesmen for vari 
 ous Chicago weeklies and monthlies uttered 
 their pleas and plaints. It was mostly the 
 same story the difficulty of finding and 
 winning over a public for art, for ideas, while 
 the great, headlong, tolerant, American 
 crowd huddles like sheep in the droves of the 
 
62 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 commercial exploiters of this or that feature 
 or fashion, this or that impulse or interest 
 of the hour. 
 
 Also it was a confession of motives and 
 feelings. Mr. Alexander Kahn loved the 
 Little Review like a sweetheart, the editor 
 of The Dial admitted his aversion from its 
 conventionality, and one and all longed for 
 that free and enlightened weekly which shall 
 outrank all other papers of whatever time 
 or clime, and make Chicago the centre of 
 the earth. Incidentally, there were more 
 personal confessions. Mr. Edgar Lee Mas 
 ters, for example, told how the Spoon River 
 Anthology was conceived nearly a year ago, 
 when his mind, already shaken out of certain 
 literary prejudices by the reading in Poetry 
 of much free verse, especially that of Mr. 
 Carl Sandburg, was spurred to more active 
 radicalism through a friendship with that 
 iconoclastic champion of free speech, free 
 form, free art freedom of the soul. At this 
 acknowledgment that Poetry had furnished 
 the spark which kindled a poet s soul to 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 63 
 
 living flame, and burned out of it the dry 
 refuse of formalism, this editor, in her 
 corner, felt a thrill of pride, and a sudden 
 warmth of unalterable conviction that, what 
 ever may happen to the magazine now or 
 later, its work can never be counted vain. 
 
 After Poetry, The Little Review, The 
 Dial., Drama, etc., had confessed bitter strug 
 gles to keep above water, we were patted 
 on the head and condescendingly put in our 
 place as "uplift magazines" by one of the 
 numerous popular monthlies which, though 
 no one ever hears of them, go out from Chi 
 cago to eager millions. "We don t turn over 
 our hands to get subscribers," said the charm 
 ingly complacent editor, "yet nothing can 
 stop them; after two brief years of life we 
 have two hundred thousand thirty thou 
 sand new ones since October. I fear these 
 well-meaning neighbors of mine don t give 
 you what you want." 
 
 As the audience laughed the mind of at 
 least one editor transformed it, and multi 
 plied it by millions, until it included the vast 
 
64 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 constituency of all those incredibly popular 
 magazines. I saw as in a Piers Ploughman 
 vision the myriads of "new readers" stretch 
 ing from sea to sea the huge, easy-going 
 American public following trampled roads, 
 gulping down pre-digested foods, suspicious 
 always of ideas, of torches, of climbing feet, 
 of singing voices a public which does not 
 stone its prophets, finding it more effective 
 to ignore them. 
 
 But, strangely enough, the vision brought, 
 instead of bitterness, a deep warming of the 
 heart. Is it not the same old crowd that 
 Langland saw the struggling, suffering 
 toilers who starve in body and mind, who 
 clutch at any straw of comfort and follow 
 any casual cry, who dream deep dreams 
 which they dare not admit and cannot ex 
 press, who grope for beauty and truth 
 through tinsel trickeries and smug falsities? 
 Are not the prophets one with them because 
 the prophets are doing the same thing 1 
 plunging with such lights as they have into 
 the darkness ? Indeed, only the prophets are 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 65 
 
 aware of what all are doing, aware of the 
 uncharted immensities against which our 
 little human torches flicker and flame; so 
 they alone feel the urgent impulse to lift 
 their torches high, to cry aloud, to reveal, to 
 lead. 
 
 The crowd rebels against the universal 
 theme of art the littleness of man or, 
 rather against the abysmal contrast between 
 his littleness and his greatness. In old Chi 
 nese paintings there is always some little 
 weazened philosopher squinting at the cat 
 aract; and so in all great art stands the ab 
 surd, earth-bound, gnome-like figure of hu 
 manity facing the infinite with inadequate 
 and unattainable dreams. Deep-buried in 
 the heart of every man is some effigy of this 
 figure, but most men are afraid of it, like 
 to bury it deeper under conventional occupa 
 tions, sentimentalities, moralities, instead of 
 permitting artists and prophets to unearth 
 it and expose it to the pitiless light. But 
 every man s heart, however perverse with 
 ignorance, however cluttered with knowl- 
 
66 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 edge, makes a secret confession of the truth. 
 Poets and prophets, therefore the beauty 
 of art, the sublimity of truth appeal to him 
 not quite in vain; and the appeal must go 
 on as long as the race endures. To the last 
 trench and the last despair certain spirits, in 
 whom the common human spark of love be 
 comes a flaming passion, must keep up the 
 eternal impossible fight for souls, for a "king 
 dom of heaven on earth." 
 
 Mr. James Oppenheim, novelist and poet, 
 is editor of "The Seven Arts," a magazine 
 of "American artists, American authors, 
 American critics for America possibly for 
 a new America, an America waking to that 
 self-consciousness which is the first step to 
 ward national greatness." Mr. Oppenheim s 
 verse is an experiment in polyrhythmic 
 forms. He submitted very courteously to 
 an interview, the report of which, he was 
 gracious enough to say, transcribed the out 
 lines of his thought with accuracy. 
 
 "There are," said Mr. James Oppenheim, 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 67 
 
 "two important currents in our contempo 
 rary poetry which seem to be the result and 
 the expression of two different conceptions 
 of poetry. In the first place there is a strong 
 English influence which has built up our 
 New England tradition. The chief charac 
 teristic of that tradition is that it has con 
 ceived poetry as intellectual rather than emo 
 tional expression. We Americans, like the 
 English, seem to fear emotion and the ex 
 pression of emotion ; we do not trust our feel 
 ings, and prefer to restrain them. As a re 
 sult, the content of the poetry created under 
 the influence of the New England tradi 
 tion is almost wholly intellectual in its char 
 acter. The poet whose influence is today 
 most strongly expressed in this poetry is 
 Robert Browning. His dramatic lyrics 
 have contributed, both in form and in con 
 tent, to the work of such men as Edward 
 Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and 
 Edgar Lee Masters, who, despite the fact 
 that he writes of the middle west, may be 
 considered a transplanted New Englander. 
 
68 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 In opposition to the ideals of the New 
 England tradition there are a few poets writ 
 ing to-day, of whom I am one, who conceive 
 poetry as being primarily an expression of 
 emotion. They do not fear their emotions 
 and they are not afraid of expressing them 
 honestly and naturally; and one of the re 
 sults of this tendency has been a loosening 
 up of poetic form. Poetic form is not in 
 itself, however, a very important matter. It 
 becomes important only after the poem has 
 been written. Today we say that the Eliza 
 bethan dramatists wrote blank verse that for 
 sheer beauty is unequalled in English liter 
 ature. But they were not, when they wrote, 
 trying to write great blank verse. They 
 were expressing themselves in the medium 
 most natural to them. So today poets are 
 writing, for example, in free verse because 
 that is theway in which they feel their poems. 
 The strongest influence felt by those of us 
 who are in revolt against the New England 
 tradition is that of Walt Whitman. But 
 what influences us in his poetry is its content, 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 69 
 
 and we are influenced by his poetic form only 
 as a result of having first been influenced 
 by his poetic content. There are, on the 
 other hand, certain contemporary followers 
 of the New England tradition who have de 
 rived their expression, but not the content 
 of their art, from the same source. 
 
 One of the greatest dangers that threatens 
 our contemporary poetry is the tendency to 
 ward localization. I feel that many of the 
 poets who are writing today are deliberately 
 representative of some small locality. Hu 
 man life and human emotions are largely the 
 same everywhere; their identity is essential, 
 their diversity only superficial. Therefore, 
 the poet who wishes to express the life of 
 any particular locality must first express the 
 life of our country as a whole. The funda 
 mentally national, and only incidentally 
 local vision, is the vision of which American 
 poetry stands in greatest need today. 
 
 The imagists have fulfilled an important 
 function in demonstrating the importance of 
 disciplining our language and in directing 
 
70 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 our attention to exactness of expression and 
 to the distinction of values in the use of 
 words. They are, in this respect, our con 
 temporary purists. But as a theory of art 
 imagism is foredoomed to failure, for it is 
 tending toward a separation between art and 
 life, and since art is a form of human expres 
 sion, there can be no divorce between life and 
 art. The chief difference between the poetry 
 of yesterday and the poetry of today lies in 
 the fact that while the poetry of yesterday 
 was an exercise, the poetry of today is an 
 expression. 
 
 If our poetry is to progress beyond its 
 present level, I feel such progress will be 
 the result of a more general revolt against 
 what I have called the English, or the New 
 England, tradition. Before our poetry can 
 truly express our life we must rid ourselves 
 of foreign influences, and become really 
 self-conscious as Americans. The culture of 
 other nations is both important and interest 
 ing, but it is far more important for our 
 art to express our own culture and our own 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 71 
 
 life than the life and the culture of other 
 peoples. Today poetry is undergoing one 
 of its periodical returns to the soil; the 
 poetry of our immediate past, the work, for 
 example, of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and 
 Richard Watson Gilder, was refined away 
 from life as far as possible. The poets of 
 yesterday tried to create an art remote from 
 life. Today we are trying to create an art 
 which shall express our own experience of 
 our own life. And the most hopeful sign 
 in our contemporary renascence of poetry is 
 that it is, fundamentally, a renascence of 
 common experience. I feel that contempo 
 rary American poetry has achieved in this 
 respect a higher level than any other literary 
 activity of today in the United States. I 
 do not think that a parallel advance has 
 been manifested in either the novel or the 
 drama. But the poetry that is being written 
 today holds out the promise of a literature 
 which, if we concentrate upon our own ex 
 perience, express our life and our emotions 
 in the form most natural to each of us in- 
 
72 THE t YOUNG IDEA 
 
 dividually, and write what we feel without 
 fear and without reticence, will truly be a 
 significant expression of American life." 
 
 Mr. Louis Untermeyer is a prophet of the 
 democratic spirit, and the social content of 
 his art finds expression in a vesture of lyric 
 beauty. He is, primarily, a singer, and his 
 ever-increasing interest in social problems 
 has in no wise diminished the beauty of his 
 songs. In the following essay he enunciates 
 that faith in the romance of the common 
 place which is the essential discovery of his 
 poetry. 
 
 The conservative of every age has been 
 his own iconoclast. And often, in building 
 on the time-eaten and treacherous timber of 
 the past, he has brought down not only his 
 idols, but the temple that contained them. 
 Our thinking is improving architecturally. 
 We blast deeper before building; we have 
 become far more critical of the foundations. 
 And, in getting down to bedrock, a hundred 
 undermined and rotting formulas have been 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 73 
 
 exposed and demolished. Many are the pre 
 served and rooted aristocracies that have 
 been threatened; and now, with the rush of 
 unsuspected energies, comes the end of the 
 aristocracy of the arts. And poetry, being 
 the most patrician of all the crafts, is the last 
 to become democratized. But the change is 
 inevitable ; its advent has come upon us with 
 the strange and sudden power of all things 
 new. New, first of all, in spirit. Not since 
 the classic New England group has Amer 
 ican poetry had so great an impetus and so 
 full-throated an utterance. And never has 
 that utterance been so rich, so free and so 
 varied. 
 
 Much of this is due to the fact that our 
 
 poets are coming back to the oldest and most 
 
 > 
 
 stirring tongue; they are using a language 
 that is the language of the people. Nor is 
 this a mere revolt from the stilted and 
 asstheticized vision of life. They have redis 
 covered the beauty and dignity, I might al 
 most say the divine core, of the casual and 
 commonplace ; and they are bringing back to 
 
74 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 ordinary speech that same beauty and dig 
 nity, calling forth its inherent warmth and 
 wonder. Whitman, as much the prophet as 
 the poet, foretold this in his little-known and 
 highly characteristic "An American Primer." 
 a thin sketch of a book which throws a series 
 of illuminating sidelights on himself and his 
 aims. In furtherance of his belief that the 
 whole "Leaves of Grass" was a gigantic lan 
 guage experiment, an effort toward a demo 
 cratic poetry, he said: "It is an attempt to 
 give the spirit, the body and the man, new 
 words, new potentialities of speech an 
 American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of 
 America is the best cosmopolitanism) range 
 of self-expression." He wrote also "The 
 Americans are going to be the most fluent 
 and melodious-voiced people in the world 
 and the most perfect users of words. * * * 
 The new times, the new people, the new vista 
 need a tongue according yes, and what is 
 more, they will have such a tongue." 
 
 And it was Whitman s use of tHe rich 
 verbal material that flowered in the street 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 75 
 
 rather than in libraries that made him so 
 remarkable. That large spirit was set free 
 and made common to all men, not so much 
 because of his form or his philosophy, but 
 because of his words. And it was this love 
 and sublimation of the colloquial and racy 
 that made him so great an artistic influence 
 an influence that was not only liberal but 
 liberating. It was Whitman, more than any 
 single element, unless one includes the in 
 direct force of a wider social feeling, that 
 broke the fetters of the poet and opened the 
 doors of America to him. 
 
 From what, it may be asked, has the poet 
 been set free ? Let us say, in a sweeping gen 
 erality, from a preoccupation with a poetic 
 past, from the repeating of echoes and glib 
 superficials, in the first place. He has been 
 transferred from a fantastic literary limbo 
 a panorama of mythological figures and 
 moralistic scraps seen through a mist. And 
 what has he been set free for? Well, for 
 one thing, to look at the world he lives in; 
 to study and synthesize the startling fusion 
 
76 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 of races and ideas; the limitless miracles of 
 science and its limitless curiosity; the grop 
 ing and stumbling toward a genuine social 
 democracy the whole welter and struggle 
 and beauty of the modern world. He has 
 been set free to face these. For even though 
 he tries to recreate the tunes of an antique 
 lyricist, listening only to the echoes of a 
 thousand years, he will find it hard to escape 
 his times. 
 
 And that escape has become increasingly 
 difficult. The wireless, the rural free de 
 livery, the ubiquitous and omniscient news 
 papers follow him everywhere. No matter 
 how distant his hiding place, he cannot get 
 away from the world s loud and restless 
 activities ; the tiniest hamlet reproduces and 
 buzzes with the stress of the whole world. 
 The retreat to the poet s ivory tower is 
 blocked on every side. 
 
 Not that the escape is impossible ; it is the 
 artists power and prerogative, and many of 
 them have availed themselves of the priv 
 ilege. Like Keats, the poet may fly to a 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 77 
 
 strange and soothing antiquity; or, like Poe, 
 he may build and populate a misty No Man s 
 Land. But unless he can make his world as 
 actual and convincing as our own, he will 
 have failed even in his escape, and cer 
 tainly in his poetry. 
 
 And it is this difference that is shown in 
 the temper of the most of the living poets; 
 they are not anxious to escape. They are 
 not frightened or disgusted with their times ; 
 they are fascinated by them. They are in 
 love with their world; passionately, even 
 painfully. It may be urged that this might 
 be said of the first poets of any time ; that the 
 artist has always been intensely interested in 
 his age and has, consciously or unconsciously, 
 reflected it. And, to a great extent, this is 
 true. But, above all, what distinguishes this 
 age from the preceding ones is its sharp, 
 probing quality, its insatiable curiosity, its 
 determined self-analysis. And it is not, as 
 in the past, the spasmodic effort of a 
 group or the rare interpretative power of 
 one great mind that stands out. It is 
 
78 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 the steady drive of the mind of man now 
 turned in like a great searchlight upon 
 itself. In every field; from the artistic to 
 the political one sees this restless search 
 ing, this effort toward new values, toward 
 ascertaining its own larger possibilities. I 
 said before that the artist had been set free 
 for a clear look at his own age. It would 
 have been truer to say that he is being set 
 free for a clear look at himself. * * * Let 
 us see by a few instances how far-reaching 
 this eagerness, this introspection, really 
 is. 
 
 James Oppenheim is an excellent example. 
 Even in the early "Doctor Rast" stories, 
 with their sentimental solutions, and the ten 
 tative "Monday Morning and Other Poems," 
 there was always apparent, beneath the 
 stammering and the awkward lines, a strain 
 ing vision. And in his recent "Songs for the 
 New Age" that vision achieves its fullest ex 
 pression. Rhapsody is still there, but it is 
 rhapsody without rant. The old passion for 
 landscapes and men and music and justice 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 79 
 
 are here also ; but it is lifted and clarified in 
 a greater singing. And there is a new ele 
 ment a slow searching that goes on beneath 
 the musical and literary surface of all the 
 poems. Beneath it, and, at the same time, 
 beyond it. Psalms and prophecies these 
 poems are, in form as well as feeling the 
 old Isaiah note, revived and lifted out of 
 the crowded streets but they are something 
 more; they are an attempt to diagnose the 
 twisted soul of man and the twisted times 
 that he lives in. In this work Oppenheim 
 reveals the world conflict reproduced within 
 one s self; it is an attempt to assemble the 
 elements of gigantic struggle and to syn 
 thesize them. 
 
 Almost at the other extreme in manner 
 and method is Edwin Arlington Robinson. 
 His sharp, even rhythms and chiselled 
 rhymes are the antithesis of Oppenheim s 
 polyrhythmic lines ; but a similar impulse is 
 in them both. Witness the close-packed sense 
 of mental struggle in the shorter poems in 
 "The Town Down the River," and the psy- 
 
80 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 chological interplay of character and envir 
 onment in "Captain Craig." Witness, also, 
 the color and simplicity, sometimes the al 
 most baffling simplicity of his speech, as 
 shown in his latest volume, "The Man 
 Against the Sky." 
 
 Or turn to a poet who has apparently noth 
 ing in common with either. In "North of 
 Boston" Robert Frost sets down a series of 
 scenes and incidents of New England life, 
 and sets it down in a loose, blank verse that 
 is so natural in speech that many missing the 
 familiar, ready-made glamor, have taken it 
 for prose. And it is in this very naturalness 
 of language, in the constant use of the spoken 
 rather than the "literary" word, that he 
 achieves both poetry and revelation. In 
 Frost we find the poet who extends our lit 
 erary borders not only with fresh sight but 
 with fresh sounds. These sounds, let in from 
 the vernacular, are full of a robust and cre 
 ative energy; they are red corpuscles to the 
 thinning blood of our speech. Possibly in 
 his "The Death of the Hired Man" 1 and 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 81 
 
 "Birches," to take two dissimilar examples, 
 this vigor of words is most evident; but it 
 leaps out of all his work with a restless, 
 somewhat roundabout but always keen and 
 plunging psychology. In his most recent 
 work ("Mountain Interval") we find these 
 
 s 
 
 same direct and distinguished qualities. But 
 a new element is here a warmer, even a 
 more whimsical reflection of a life that 
 seemed gray, and, even in its humors, grim. 
 This geniality does not mean that Frost s 
 penetration is any less deep than it was; it 
 means merely that he has brought emotions 
 nearer the surface. So with the unexpected 
 lyrics in this volume; they emphasize the 
 happier undercurrent by emphasizing the 
 singer no less than the seeker. It is its differ 
 ences even more than its similarities that 
 make "Mountain Interval" a worthy suc 
 cessor to "North of Boston." 
 
 Scarcely less unusual is Edgar Lee Mas 
 ters "Spoon River Anthology" an inter 
 esting and remarkable work, although as a 
 book of poems a greatly overrated one. For, 
 
82 THE .YOUNG IDEA 
 
 though he shares that same clarity and di 
 rectness of eye and speech with the others, 
 "Spoon River Anthology," although it is 
 notable as character drawing and drama, is 
 often negligible in poetic power. At least, 
 poetry is its frailest quality. For when Mr. 
 Masters writes, as he sometimes tries to do, 
 poetry per se y his fresh strength is mixed 
 with a stale and mystical flabbiness. Most 
 of the rhymed portions of his new "Songs 
 and Satires" are cases in point. It may be 
 that his sharp irony dulls the edge of his 
 poetic impulse. Or it may be that Mr. Mas 
 ters is a sharp-eyed novelist and not, first 
 of all, a poet. Compare his treatment of peo 
 ple, for instance, with Frost s. Masters, 
 with great sophistication and almost constant 
 disillusion, enjoys most of all the surface 
 gossip of his folk; sometimes he throws a 
 high light on one submerged motive or inci 
 dent (or a series of them) in his characters 
 lives. But Frost goes deeper ; his light, less 
 brilliant and less superficial, does not merely 
 set off his figures. It penetrates them. It 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 83 
 
 reaches down through his people to their 
 roots; it strikes the soil from which they 
 grew. It even transforms the whole country 
 side and makes it something more than an 
 effective background; it gives his setting the 
 quality of an immense and moving actor in 
 the lives of the folk it overshadows. 
 
 Amy Lowell s recent New England dia 
 lect poems, done with her usual economy of 
 line, have some of these qualities. Her vol 
 ume "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" dis 
 plays other but no less striking sides of her 
 ability. Of all the women singers in Amer 
 ica (and there are at least a dozen excellent 
 ones) she is the most vigorous and individual. 
 Her work blends very curiously a delicate, 
 feminine whimsy, a love of diablerie and the 
 grotesque with an almost stark, square-shoul 
 dered virility. With all these, and an in 
 cisive satire, she cuts through tawdry and the 
 commonplace surfaces to hidden and beauti 
 ful depths. Swinging away on one hand 
 from the soft sighings of her past and on the 
 other from the rigidity of the Imagists credo, 
 
84 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 she has achieved a poise and a power rare 
 among American poets of either sex. 
 
 No clear perspective has as yet been al 
 lowed the Imagists themselves. They have 
 suffered chiefly from two things; too much 
 advertising and the larger group s hatred 
 for the smaller one. But the infuriated 
 critics of Imagism have suffered still more. 
 They have for the most part fallen heatedly 
 from their calm eminences by making the 
 mistake of denouncing not the Imagist poets 
 nor the Imagist propaganda, but the Imagist 
 pronunciamento. Most of them failed to 
 see that when they were attacking the 
 Imagists credo of "using the exact word"; 
 of allowing "freedom in choice of subject"; 
 of "producing poetry that is hard and clear," 
 and of the "importance of concentration," 
 they were attacking the essentials of all 
 great literature. The Imagists, realizing 
 the need for the constant re-statement and 
 re-shaping of old truths, have repeated con 
 sciously certain fundamental principles ob 
 served by every poet more or less uncon- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 85 
 
 sciously. And even their over-emphasis will 
 have a salutary rather than a harmful effect. 
 Discounting the inverted classicism that still 
 attaches itself to certain poets of the group, 
 in spite of the frantic convulsions of its more 
 spectacular adherents and recent self -elected 
 exponents, for all its occasional fridigity and 
 frequent exaggerations that spring from an 
 unholy fear of the cliche, Imagism is a 
 strong influence for good. It is excellent 
 fertilizer in the fields of poetry; it will help 
 nurture the new and stronger crop. It will 
 do this since its very "hardness," its sharp 
 edges and images, and its constant insistence 
 on packing and cutting down are a vigorous 
 and healthy reaction from the verbose, the 
 carelessly facile and the pale, pretty reiter 
 ations of a rubber-stamp loveliness. 
 
 The list of the "new" poets could be pro 
 longed for another page. Though only a few 
 are mentioned, one must notice Vachel Lind 
 say, with his infectious combination of 
 rhymes, rag-time and religion; his remark 
 able attempts to interpret the soul of a nation 
 
86 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 through its sounds, and his efforts to bring 
 art, prohibition and Socialism (and his faith 
 in this strange blend is not the least of his 
 qualities) to the villages. Mr. Lindsay sees 
 (and hears) poetry not only in Springfield 
 and the moving pictures, but in negro camp- 
 meetings and automobile horns and fire- 
 engines and the United States Senate and 
 a Chinese laundry. Nor are his eyes and 
 ears any the less keen when Mr. Lindsay is 
 in a quieter and more meditative mood. 
 
 But to proceed: John Hall Wheelock, in 
 his "The Human Fantasy" and "The Be 
 loved Adventure," two volumes vibrant with 
 "the warm recklessness of lavish life," is an 
 other of the poets who see "the universe made 
 of dust, but holy to the core" ; his work glows 
 with the realization of a "lovable, sordid hu 
 manity." In the first of these volumes is the 
 splendid lyric "Sunday Evening in the Com 
 mon," one of the loveliest of pure American 
 lyrics, with the exception of Poe s "To 
 Helen" and Whitman s Lincoln elegies. 
 
 Then there is Witter Bynner, who can get 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 87 
 
 magic and metaphysics out of a Pullman 
 smoker; William Ellery Leonard with "The 
 Vaunt of Man" to his great credit and a 
 group of poignant sonnets ; Arthur Davison 
 Ficke, another eminent sonneteer who stings 
 his archaisms into life with the whiplash of 
 a personality; Carl Sandburg, whose first 
 volume, "Chicago Poems," shows him at 
 times the most tender and at times the most 
 brutal of our poets ; who proves Synge s con 
 tention that it is the timber of poetry that 
 wears most surely, and there "is no timber 
 that has not strong roots among the clay and 
 worms." Plain speaking and outspoken, he 
 uses words as weapons ; but he can also use 
 them as delicately as an engraver his tool. 
 He has the etcher s power, with its firm, 
 clean-cut and always suggestive line but he 
 is never merely the artist. His hate, a 
 strengthening and challenging force, might 
 overbalance the power of his work were it 
 not exceeded by the fiercer virility of his love. 
 Arturo Giovanitti, with his hot and raucous 
 hymns of democracy, is another radical, min- 
 
88 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 gling these two dangerous combustibles, love 
 and dynamite. Also there is Clement Wood, 
 another fiery poet of protest, whose first vol 
 ume is still to appear; William Rose Benet, 
 with his affections divided between stark 
 modernities and rollicking chanties or weird 
 ballads of a fantastic world; John G. Nei- 
 hardt, Maxwell Bodenheim, Eunice Tiet- 
 jens, Margaret Widdemer, Harriet Monroe, 
 Helen Hoyt, Max Eastman and a dozen 
 other strangely contrasted artists could be 
 added. 
 
 And though all these poets differ in choice 
 of theme, in method and in temper, still they 
 are united by a definite though a loose bond. 
 Each of these poets respond to and reflect 
 the two strangely creative powers of our day 
 its restlessness and analysis. Each poet 
 is an active part of a new impetus and fervor ; 
 in his love for his times he is revealing both 
 himself and his age. He is determined to 
 know his world and to realize it completely. 
 He does something more than accept a shop 
 worn glamor and formulas of beauty that 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 89 
 
 have been handed down to him ; he questions 
 them. He is going to look for beauty for 
 himself everywhere, in strange places pos 
 sibly; but he is going to find it. And he 
 is going to wrest it from the neglected and 
 trivial even out of the dark cavern of the 
 ugly and the subconscious. For it is this in 
 tense love for the whole world, not a part of 
 it, that impels and uplifts him. He sees the 
 amazing vitality beneath what seems merely 
 vociferous; he knows the health that is in 
 the heart of vulgarity. And it is this burn 
 ing intensity, this analysis, that sharpens and 
 vivifies all incidents and emotions; that re 
 veals the ordinary in fresh and shining colors. 
 There are poets, no doubt, who still can be 
 unstirred by these things within his world. 
 But the poet to-day who definitely desires to 
 escape them is rare, a creature to be won 
 dered at rather than to be scorned. He is 
 not exactly a coward. He is much too be 
 wildered and half-hearted to be that. He 
 is an anachronism. For poetry is something 
 more than a graceful, literary escape from 
 
90 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 life. It is a spirited encounter with it. 
 
 Miss Margaret Widdemer, a writer of 
 both verse and prose, writes illuminatingly 
 of the relation of the contemporary poet to 
 the world about him. 
 
 There unquestionably is a new movement 
 in our literature today; a distinct effort to ] 
 formulate and realize ourselves and our re 
 lation to life in the present, as differing from 
 the old feeling which, more or less differently 
 phrased, the writers of other times have felt, 
 of "writing for eternity." The older idea, 
 I think, was to write, if the work was serious 
 at all, of the eternal verities, the things which 
 were and would be changeless, and were of 
 no time. What reflection of the moment s 
 thought was in their work was more or less 
 an involuntary thing, though to this unin 
 tentional reflection of the psychology of the 
 moment many of the older writers owe what 
 place remains to them in the present. We 
 have come to the place where our civiliza- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 91 
 
 tion is becoming self-conscious, and record 
 its own attitude of mind, knowing this to be 
 a thing as worthy of record as any attitude 
 of mind we may glean from writers of other 
 periods. We are realizing that romance, and 
 the battle between good and evil, is here with 
 us, not locked on shelves with book-people in 
 costume, and are self-consciously evoking it. 
 This is the most important feeling in 
 deed, the main feeling of today s literature. 
 It has its good and evil side, as any self- 
 consciousness has. We are in danger of com 
 ing to feel that our view is the only view, our 
 age the only age, and, in our anxiety to lose 
 false glamor and false relations, lose the 
 True Romance, and drop into a fashion of 
 making our books laborious patchworks 
 made out of little pieces of meaningless, aim 
 less realities, as futile as a Futurist color- 
 scheme. If we can show that the little scraps 
 and pieces of our lives today will eventually 
 make a thing which is as real and worth 
 while and great as any of the old great ro 
 mances we are creating something which is 
 
92 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 epic and lasting. In these alternatives lie 
 our danger and our capability of success. 
 
 As to my own work, I think that any work 
 which bears a deliberate and self-conscious 
 relation to "movements" is in just so far 
 a mistaken and artificial mechanism, not cre 
 ative or alive at all. My poetry has never 
 been written with the deliberate idea of ex 
 pressing this or that ; it has been written be 
 cause it was there in my mind to write, with 
 out any idea of being "among those present." 
 But looking at it as a body of work, now 
 that it is something done and printed, it 
 seems to me that I have unknowingly taken 
 for my share of the day s self-expression the 
 things women are thinking and feeling the 
 things that many of them are not yet able to 
 say. I am not the only one who is doing 
 this. I only mean that this is what I seem 
 to myself to be doing. As to my prose, I 
 don t think I can say what relation that has 
 to present day literary movements, because 
 as yet I have tried to do little more than be 
 a story-teller in the bazaar to relate ro- 
 
THE EMPIRICISTS 93 
 
 mances which should be sane and light- 
 hearted, and which would make people gayer, 
 perhaps, and perhaps a little comforted 
 about the gray spots in the world, for read 
 ing them. 
 
 I don t believe I am capable of a criticism 
 of "contemporary literature as a whole" any 
 more than I have done. It s going to be a 
 big thing, I believe, but, like America itself, 
 it is as yet chaotic, a grand, but unwelded 
 thing. It isn t a whole so far. But I know 
 it will be. 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 
 
II 
 
 THE ROMANTICISTS 
 
 THE essence of romanticism is a revolt 
 against convention; in art every romantic 
 movement has manifested itself in a deter 
 mination to extend the domain of experience 
 and likewise to transcend the traditional 
 forms of expression. The romantic quality 
 of any professedly romantic work of art, 
 therefore, lies either in a content which is 
 strangely new or in an unwonted medium of 
 expression, or both; any or all of which is 
 intended to produce the superb shock of the 
 unexpected, and evoke an emotional reaction 
 whose quality has either been completely for 
 gotten, or else previously undiscovered. By 
 pushing the definition to its logical conclu 
 sion we should learn that the quality of ro 
 mance lies, not in the work of art at all, but 
 97 
 
98 THE L YOUNG IDEA 
 
 in the emotion it arouses. In so far as it 
 does not produce this distinctive quality of 
 emotion it fails in being romantic. 
 
 I shall be reproached, I fear, for terming 
 the representatives of Imagism and of Spec- 
 trism Romanticists. On the one hand, Miss 
 Knish assures us that the doctrines of the 
 Spectric school, of which her collaborator, 
 Mr. Morgan, is the founder, are a fresh in 
 terpretation of classic gospels. On the other 
 hand, we have been assured that the reforms 
 which the Imagists are trying to work in our 
 poetry have as their object principles which 
 "are the essentials of all great poetry." But 
 to be essentially romantic, a work of art need 
 discover to us no new methods and no new 
 idiom. If through old methods long for 
 gotten and an old idiom it tricks our emo 
 tions into responding to a new experience, it 
 has accomplished an essentially romantic re 
 sult. So that, whether the principles of 
 Imagism and of Spectrism are new or not, 
 we are privileged to call the poetry in which 
 they have found expression romantic art, if 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 99 
 
 for no other reason than that it has, judging 
 by its reception, produced an emotional re 
 action of romantic quality in its readersT"] 
 But there is a further reason that we can 
 urge in justification, and that is that these 
 two schools are preoccupied chiefly with pro 
 mulgating a new technique. Imagism and 
 Spectrism are admittedly programmes of re 
 volt in the field of expression. 
 
 The singular fact in the existence of these 
 two schools is that their fundamental objects 
 are directly antithetical. Imagists proclaim 
 their faith in a rendering of an exact picture 
 in an idiom which combines the character 
 istics of suggestion, vividness, concentration, 
 and externality, in either of two forms, free 
 verse or polyphonic prose. The Spectrists 
 have as their objects the diffraction of emo 
 tion, and the conveying of after-images and 
 overtones; moreover, they employ both the 
 traditional poetic forms and free verse. The 
 Spectrists thus seem, in a measure, to be 
 chiefly interested in blurring and encircling 
 with a haze of symbols the image which the 
 
100 THE .YOUNG IDEA 
 
 Imagists, in their poems, are anxious to con 
 vey with photographic precision. 
 
 This is not the place to further elucidate 
 the theories of these two schools of writers. 
 Readers who wish for more light are re 
 ferred to the preface to "Some Imagist 
 Poets," and to Miss Amy Lowell s article, 
 "A Consideration of Modern Poetry" in The 
 North American Review for January, 1917, 
 and to the preface to "Spectra" by Miss 
 Knish and Mr. Morgan. It is interesting to 
 note, however, that the poetry of both these 
 schools emphasizes, each in its own way, a 
 point touched upon in the contribution of 
 Miss Harriet Munroe, the contrast between 
 man s littleness and the greatness of the uni 
 verse and the fantastic and ironic self-im 
 portance of man in his relation to the uni 
 verse. 
 
 Mr. John Gould Fletcher belongs, with 
 Miss Amy Lowell, to the Imagists, whose 
 program was first enunciated in 1913. His 
 two volumes of verse, "Irradiations. Sand 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 101 
 
 and Spray/ and "Goblins and Pagodas," 
 have given to the public his theory of the art 
 of poetry and the product of its practice. He 
 has been concerned chiefly with experiments 
 in new forms. But what he has to say, in the 
 following essay, of the content and form of 
 contemporary poetry, brings additional 
 light to bear upon the changes which he, in 
 common with the other Imagists, are striving 
 to bring about in our writing. 
 
 There can be no doubt that at present 
 there is a striving and a stirring in American 
 Literature, on a scale never before witnessed. 
 Hitherto the progress of American Liter 
 ature has been a question of individuals 
 rather than of groups. The effect of the Civil 
 War was to unify the country politically, 
 but to decentralize it intellectually. When 
 the Civil War came, a small group of men 
 in New England controlled America s lit 
 erary destiny. The sixty years that have 
 passed since then have been years of break- 
 
102 THE L YOUNG IDEA 
 
 up and transition, and the figures that have 
 dominated those years Henry James, Mark 
 Twain, Bret Harte have been isolated ex 
 amples of genius rather than products of any 
 intense feeling for literature on the part of 
 large bodies of their fellow-countrymen. It 
 is noteworthy that all three of these men 
 spent large portions of their lives in Europe, 
 as if driven by inner necessity to seek a more 
 favorable atmosphere for production and 
 discussion of literature than America offered. 
 Only Whitman remained, and Whitman 
 waited his life long for the appreciation that 
 never came from his country. 
 
 At present all this is changed. America 
 is demanding a national literature, and al 
 though this aspiration is not likely to be sat 
 isfied for some years yet, nevertheless steps 
 are being taken to meet it. The War has 
 had the effect of making Americans realize 
 that they are something essentially different, 
 in spite of the accident of a similar language, 
 from the English ; and in spite of the accident 
 of immigration, from the European stocks. 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 103 
 
 America is now engaged in the process of 
 discovering itself. The process is not yet 
 completed, nor has it gone on long enough 
 to enable us with any confidence to predict 
 what the future America may produce. We 
 can only say that the battle for a new Amer 
 ica is being fought out most fiercely, in the 
 field of pOetry. Poetry, which may be de 
 fined as the art of the rhythmical expression 
 of the emotions, has, from its very essence, 
 attracted so far the most fanatical of those 
 who wish to renew American Literature. At 
 the same time, it is more difficult to predict 
 what the future course of American poetry 
 may be than that of any other form of lit 
 erary activity, for two reasons: First, be 
 cause there is not yet a large body of per 
 sons who constantly read new poetry; sec 
 ond, because the great majority of American 
 
 editors and critics who deal with poetry have 
 
 i 
 
 no other standards to guide them than the 
 remote traditions of their school days, when 
 they were trained to assimilate that which, 
 whatever its place of origin, was strictly in 
 
104 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 line with English standards of writing. 
 Now there is only one thing which may be 
 definitely predicted of American poetry, and 
 that is, whatever it may become in the future, 
 it can no longer follow English standards. 
 Long ago Poe realized this fact, and strove 
 to break loose from the ideals of the English 
 Reviews, and to combat the influence of the 
 small New England group, who, thanks to 
 their long settlement in the country, and uni 
 versity training and sea-going traditions, re 
 mained true to English guidance. Later on 
 Whitman devoted his life to the same cause 
 of an autochthonous literature. Meanwhile, 
 England and Europe in general steadfastly 
 refused to recognize any American literature 
 which was not impregnated with this native 
 taint and aim. This process has been accen 
 tuated since the outbreak of the War. The 
 outstanding results of the European cata 
 clysm have been, politically and intellectu 
 ally, to set apart from the influence of the 
 seaboard, the Central United States, from 
 the Alleghanies to the Rockies, and from the 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 105 
 
 Canadian border to the Gulf, and to pro 
 claim their predominance. This block of 
 central and valley States now controls Amer 
 ica; it is setting its face southward and west 
 ward ; and all other American forces, such as 
 the small New England group, are being 
 drawn into its current. 
 
 Athwart and throughout this central ten 
 dency there runs yet a mixture of emotional 
 and intellectual factors confusing the issue. 
 There is first of all the factor of racial hered 
 ity, and of its assimilation to American con 
 ditions. This is incalculable. Secondly and 
 more calculable as to outcome, are the factors 
 of the struggle between vers libre and 
 rhymed metre, of realism versus personal 
 fantasy, of poetry based upon external phe 
 nomena or internal symbolism. Let us ex 
 amine each one in turn. 
 
 The battle for vers libre stands as good as 
 won, in my opinion. America has something 
 new and different to express, and a new ex 
 pression cannot be clothed in a guise of an 
 old form, any more than new wine can be 
 
106 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 put into new bottles. We must create our 
 poetics for ourselves. The mere fact that 
 we choose for the purposes of our writing 
 a language very nearly similar to the Eng 
 lish tongue, means nothing, any more than 
 the New Testament, by being written in 
 Greek, holds parentage with Homer and 
 Euripides. We must content ourselves with 
 not trying to imitate English models, which 
 were created for a different atmosphere and 
 public than our own, and set ourselves reso 
 lutely to the task of creating new ones. 
 Nevertheless, it is important to note that vers 
 libres are as easy to write as rhymed dog 
 gerel, and that there is no hope for any form 
 which will not develop. In its primitive 
 shape, as in the works of Whitman, vers 
 libre is simply natural rhythm the rhythm 
 of the sea, the river, the wind blowing over a 
 lake or the boughs rocking in the wind. We 
 must go further than this. We must build 
 up these rhythms into stanzas or blocks of 
 rhythm. We must admit rhyme, allitera 
 tion, assonance, as occasional but valuable 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 107 
 
 adjuncts. We must take up the problem of 
 the development of our themes, and of our 
 style. 
 
 The struggle between realism and per 
 sonal fantasy has not yet been settled. The 
 realists such as Frost or Masters, have given 
 us broadly shaped works, but no intensely 
 vividly memorable lines. The followers of 
 individual fantasy, such as the Imagists, to 
 which I belong, the New York "Others" 
 group, the recently-appearing Spectrists, 
 have given vividly memorable lines and short 
 poems, but nothing of the depth and human 
 breadth which the Realists display. It is 
 noteworthy that these Fantaisists (if such I 
 may call them), have shown a distinct ten 
 dency to group themselves into schools about 
 certain centres, whereas the Realists are 
 mostly separate phenomena. 
 
 It is also noteworthy that diverse poets as, 
 for example, Vachel Lindsay and Conrad 
 Aiken, seem to be unable to fit into either 
 group, but are striving for a blend of Real 
 ism and Fantasy a poetry which demands 
 
108 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 at once the most precise observation and the 
 most complete use and control of such ob 
 servation to imaginative ends. 
 
 As regards the third great question, that 
 of external application versus internal sym 
 bolism, I must admit that the former is at 
 present triumphant, although my own sym 
 pathies go mostly with the latter. It seems 
 to me that as the imagination of the poet 
 exercises itself more and more freely, there 
 must come a time when he realizes that the 
 aim of all this can be nothing more or less 
 than the attempt to reconcile material phe 
 nomena with internal ideas and feelings 
 whether these be his own or those of other 
 people. And this attempt can only express 
 itself by employing the external world as 
 more or less definite symbolical material. In 
 this respect I must disagree with the "exter- 
 nalism" of so brilliant a poet as Miss Amy 
 ^Lowell, whose work seems to me, neverthe 
 less, the culmination of her own theory. 
 
 Having thus briefly examined the state of ; 
 poetry today in America, let me conclude 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 109 
 
 with a word of hope for the future. 
 
 America will only attain to her fullest lit 
 erary development if she can be made to re 
 alize that achievement and theory must go 
 hand in hand. We must be prepared to build 
 up anew, on a new basis, and therefore we 
 must not seek to compare ourselves to for 
 eign models, nor to imitate these in any way, 
 but only to use them, in whatever language 
 written, as objects of study. We must free 
 ourselves of any dogmatic adherence to for 
 eign literatures, whether these be English, 
 French, German or Russian but be pre 
 pared to make use of any foreign idea that 
 achieves our ends, in exactly the self-same 
 spirit as the men who build the skyscrapers 
 of New York employ the elements of for 
 eign architectural styles, for a different pur 
 pose. 
 
 Above all, we must create intelligible the 
 ories of Art to match our practice, and the 
 discussion and revision of these theories must 
 proceed constantly. It is ridiculous for any 
 one to suppose that poetry or any other Art 
 
110 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 can progress without criticism, or that in 
 the Elizabethan, or any other age, literature 
 sprang spontaneously from the soil. We 
 know that this was not the case. The theory 
 and practice of English Poetry have ever 
 gone hand in hand since the generation im 
 mediately preceding the great Elizabethans 
 a generation whose ardent discussion of 
 the merits of rhymed as against classical and 
 rhymeless metres closely resembles the 
 battle being waged about vers libre to-day. 
 And any opportunity to enlarge the bounds 
 of discussion by defending whatever is novel 
 in one s own practice, should therefore be 
 welcomed by every serious American poet. 
 
 Miss Amy Lowell is so well-known as the 
 apologist of the Imagist movement in this 
 country that her paper requires no preface. 
 Her most recent books of verse are "A 
 Dome of Many-Colored Glass," "Sword 
 Blades and Poppy Seed," and "Men, 
 Women and Ghosts," in addition to which 
 she has published a volume of criticism, "Six 
 French Poets," 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 111 
 
 ( 1 ) I think there is distinctly a new move 
 ment today, but I regard that movement as 
 especially evident in poetry at the present 
 moment. Prose is still too much under the 
 domination of magazine editors to have 
 broken away and started anything very new. 
 Our prose writers are still inferior to those 
 of England. Our poets, on the other hand, 
 are, I think, inferior to none living today, 
 either in England or in the European coun 
 tries. 
 
 (2) It is a little difficult to say what are 
 the ideals of a movement. (And in speaking 
 of the new movement I shall confine myself 
 strictly to poetry.) I should say that the 
 ideal evidenced in all the better poetry to 
 day is toward a great naturalness and sim 
 plicity; a trend away frcm the sentimental 
 and pretty-pretty, which for so long reigned 
 in American verse. The poets today are 
 seeking reality the greater reality, which 
 includes ideality; they are seeking it through 
 the simplicity and beauty of current speech ; 
 and, with a greater faith in the universe, they 
 
112 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 find poetry in many quarters where the older 
 poets did not admit it to exist. The cur 
 rent discussion of forms shows a very super 
 ficial conception of the new poetry, forms 
 being merely a means to an end. The new 
 movement can be found, not only among the 
 vers librists, but among those writers who 
 habitually employ the older forms. 
 
 (3) It is impossible to say which of the 
 new currents of poetry seem to be import 
 ant. These currents are like the contribu- 
 tary streams of a great river. They are all 
 important to the development of the main 
 flow. So long as they be authentic and sin 
 cere each has its place. 
 
 (4) You ask me what relation my own 
 work bears to this movement, which is a 
 question very difficult for anyone to answer 
 about oneself. My aim is for greater depth, 
 beauty, sincerity, and vividness. To that 
 end, I am interested in many methods of 
 attaining it; but I insist that poetry must 
 always be poetical, and I prefer that it 
 should be dramatic as well. Poetry, to my 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 113 
 
 mind, is man s endeavor to express, not only 
 his emotions, but the highest beauty he ap 
 prehends; and any method is permissible 
 which conveys that emotion and that beauty 
 to the reader. 
 
 This does not, of course, mean that readers 
 may not have to be taught a new idiom. A 
 poet should always be ahead of his time, 
 otherwise he is no true seer in the old sense 
 of the word, "to perceive." It is those poets 
 who have been more misapprehended during 
 the time of their writing who have meant 
 most to succeeding generations. 
 
 (5) As to my criticism of contemporary 
 American literature that is almost too large 
 a subject to deal with in a letter. The great 
 danger hitherto has been the large prices 
 which popular magazines pay for the sort 
 of thing that attracts their clients. As 
 writers must live, there has come about a sort 
 of facile writing, built very much upon one 
 pattern, and which is sure of its audience. 
 This has done an immense amount to injure 
 American literature. But it is a natural and 
 
THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 healthy sign that the poets, possibly because 
 they have no temptation, have been able to 
 free themselves from this commercial influ 
 ence. As poetry is the most highly emotion 
 alized of all the forms of writing, it is also 
 natural and proper that they should be the 
 first to break away from a baneful influence. 
 Doubtless the prose writers will follow their 
 lead before long. The true poetical move 
 ment today must not be confused with the 
 desire to shock and surprise in some modern 
 verse. Where a few people are sincere and 
 original, there will always be a crowd of 
 imitators to follow them. Time alone can 
 sift the chaff from the wheat. But that such 
 imitators do exist is no proof that the more 
 serious of the modern poets are not sincere. 
 
 The latest of the movements for a wider 
 technical freedom in poetry is that brought 
 forward by the Spectrists, a school for which 
 Miss Anne Knish and Mr. Emanuel Mor 
 gan stand as sponsors. Miss Knish defines 
 its aim as a fresh interpretation of classic 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 115 
 
 gospels. She believes our present poetic re 
 nascence to be a derivation from a stale cur 
 rent. 
 
 I do not know if I have a right to speak on 
 this subject, for American poets will resent, 
 perhaps, the criticism of one whose native 
 tongue is the Russian, and who has written 
 only one English book. Yet since you ask 
 me, I will answer, with humility, as to poetry 
 only. 
 
 Your new movement in poetry seems to 
 me too closely derived from a French move 
 ment that is already ancient history to Con 
 tinental Europe. Young people without 
 genius slip into this stale current and have 
 much fun; but many of their tragic poems 
 are of humorous effect, I think, and when 
 they would be funny I sometimes weep. It 
 is like a piece of cheese left over at break- ^ 
 fast. So little is basically grounded on a 
 theory of aesthetic that is of new import; and 
 these young people fear the classic aesthetic 
 as they would poison. They need not; 
 
116 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 though we seek new drinks to become 
 drunken with, the doctrine of Aristoteles re 
 mains the staff of life, the bread. 
 
 We who are of the Spectric School of 
 poets have tried, contradicting no ancient 
 truth, to give fresh interpretation to classic 
 gospels. If our aesthetic dogma be sound, 
 the other poets will before long become 
 aware. But these are in American poetry 
 days only of beginning; and I think these 
 people know nothing of European literary 
 history who speak so much of "new, new, 
 new!" 
 
 Mr. Emanuel Morgan, collaborator with 
 Miss Knish upon "Spectra," tells us that 
 the essential quality of Spectric poetry is 
 humor, and defines its basis in vision. 
 
 Yes, there is a new, or, rather, renewed 
 movement in poetry. Its ideals are life. It 
 is born of the death of the immediate past. 
 Its most important current, for the moment, 
 seems to me to be the current of mirth, and 
 
THE ROMANTICISTS 117 
 
 in that current much of our work belongs. 
 We call ourselves a "School." But all we 
 are doing, as I see it, is to combine and 
 realize qualities which are appearing, now 
 here, now there, among much modern poetry 
 not professedly spectrist, viz. : catholicity of 
 subject and metre, a quick registering of 
 mental reflections by a sort of leapfrog 
 metaphor, an exchange of intuitions; in 
 short, by imagination or humor, a breaking 
 through the mere pretty or ugly surface of 
 things. 
 
 In our own convenient terms, spectrism 
 belongs to its time in that it intends the poem 
 or spectrum, by means of laughter or other 
 illumination, to send an enchanted X-ray 
 through the skin to the lungs and liver and 
 heart of life. 
 
THE IDEALISTS: 
 
 THE RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT 
 UALITY 
 
Ill 
 
 THE IDEALISTS 
 
 THE four poets here grouped as Idealists 
 could be more accurately described as spir 
 itualists, did not the word spiritualism con 
 vey a special connotation which does not in 
 the least apply to the theories of these poets. 
 The idea which each of them has expressed 
 is that today we are experiencing a rena 
 scence of faith, that after an era in which 
 spiritual experience was doubted and during 
 which the soul was denied, the writers, as in 
 terpreters of the thought and the feeling of 
 their time, have discovered, as the most im 
 portant thing in life, the soul of man and its 
 relation to the absolute. 
 
 They would claim that literature which 
 does not take into account man s religious 
 experience is superficial and false to life. 
 121 
 
122 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 Their point of view may briefly be described 
 thus: Science, in its quest for a wholly 
 truthful explanation of the world in which 
 we live, has achieved only a partial explana 
 tion, since it is dependent upon rational 
 proof in establishing the validity of its doc 
 trines. But beyond the truth which science 
 has established, there lies another body of 
 truth revealed to man intuitively in the ex 
 perience of faith. This body of truth may 
 or may not in the future be susceptible of 
 rational proof; at present we apprehend it 
 only subjectively and intuitively in faith. 
 And it is this experience of faith and its dis 
 covery of the ideal within the real which these 
 four writers believe to be the most signifi 
 cant contribution of our life to-day, in its 
 expression in literature. 
 
 Plato believed that our joy in the dis 
 covery of beauty and truth in the world was 
 founded upon an unconscious memory of the 
 perfect truth and beauty seen by the soul 
 in its heavenly chariot ride before birth. The 
 fable of the heavenly chariot ride was his 
 
THE IDEALISTS 123 
 
 poetic interpretation of the experience of 
 faith. And these poets, in saying that the 
 highest art is an expression of spiritual ex 
 perience, and that as such it moves us 
 through our souls, are restating in a modern 
 form the idealism of Plato. 
 
 Mr. William Rose Benet s gospel is one of 
 greater individualism, as against the ten 
 dency toward a democratization of poetry. 
 But his central thought is of the essential 
 concern of poetry with the things of the 
 spirit. 
 
 Yes, I think a new movement in American 
 literature is making itself felt. It was first 
 manifested in the field of poetry. The re 
 cent revival of free verse and the introduc 
 tion of some new cults, such as Imagism, 
 have had, on the whole, an invigorating influ 
 ence. The point is not that the things now 
 being done in verse are new, but that they 
 have shaken awake the faculties of poets and 
 critics (widely apart as are some of these in 
 
124 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 their opinions). How much of the flood of 
 contemporary experimentation will remain 
 when the inevitable alternating ebb sets in 
 is beyond anybody to say very comprehen 
 sively. So much for poetry. American fic 
 tion is now working toward greater sincerity 
 than in past years, I think, having already 
 attained a very high average of technical 
 merit. The "manner" has been mastered 
 the "matter" will be more vital in most 
 novels and short stories from now on. At 
 least, such is my particular faith. The ro 
 mantic school both in prose and poetry is out 
 of fashion at present. I suppose my own 
 work falls more into the romantic category 
 than into the realistic, though, as far as my 
 reading goes, I enjoy Dostoievsky and Ed 
 gar Lee Masters immensely. Poetry, in my 
 opinion, cannot escape a certain touch of 
 mysticism. Prose, if desired, can dispense 
 with this element entirely. But the most 
 realistic poets and take Masters again, for 
 an example (as he is, just at present, the 
 cynosure of all eyes) the most realistic of 
 
THE IDEALISTS 125 
 
 poets, as Masters, cannot wholly escape his 
 particular mysticism, cannot surrender him 
 self entirely to a materialistic or even a ra 
 tionalistic conception of the universe. This 
 has nothing to do with his opinions upon or 
 ganized society or anything else it is most 
 often involuntary, but nevertheless creeps 
 into and most beautifully permeates his 
 graver poems. Prose discussion can often 
 win through a climax of glib denial, that con 
 vinces temporarily. I feel that real poetry 
 cannot for our deepest thoughts cannot 
 (by the nature of the animal!) deny, though 
 they may be saturated with doubt. Those 
 most truly poets are necessarily mystics to 
 a certain extent whether they like it or 
 not. They do not arrive at their conclusions 
 by the straight streets of logic, but by the 
 wandering roads of emotion, in spite of 
 themselves often. For one of the necessities 
 to their being artists is, after all, to be able 
 to feel why a thing is right or wrong. One 
 could reason it out all day and, without this 
 feeling, which engenders the creative emo- 
 
126 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 tion, could have no nucleus in one s decisions 
 for any work of art. Dealing with a me 
 dium, such as poetry, which depends mainly 
 upon its emotion for its greatness, the ra 
 tionalist must be comparatively sterile 
 unless his "reason" seethes itself into "pas 
 sion," in which case the mystical quality 
 enters again and "rationalism" becomes a 
 misnomer. 
 
 Therefore, I do not feel that our glib di 
 visions of poets into romantic and realistic 
 groups or clans is any very great matter. 
 
 I dislike cliques, schools, sects, and 
 "movements" in poetry. There is usually 
 one leader to each, who produces something. 
 The rest strive to make themselves like the 
 leader and come off as badly as Atherton in 
 "Atherton s Gambit," in Edwin Arlington 
 Robinson s poem. There is always the 
 "brains" of the "movement." In poetry the 
 "movement" itself has never mattered, it has 
 been the individual. It always will be. You 
 cannot any more democratize poetry than 
 you can democratize a humming-bird ex- 
 
THE IDEALISTS 127 
 
 cept in this sense, that more people educate 
 their finer faculties, or get them educated, 
 as time goes on, and so come to look into the 
 books that were always under their noses. 
 Say to a poet that he must write about the 
 laboring-man, the brothel, the tenement, the 
 slaughter-house, and you would have him 
 immediately writing of all the fairy people 
 and places and all the mythological rigama- 
 roles in the world and serve you right! 
 But say to a poet that he must play safely 
 inside the garden palings and you ll have 
 him running down Queer Street in his night 
 shirt, waving a petroleum torch. Such are 
 poets in other words, they are strong indi 
 vidualists, and when they try to herd to 
 gether the sight is just too pitiful for any 
 thing! 
 
 In closing I wish to say that I am not a 
 Whitmanite. Whitman was a great writer, 
 but from the present babble of all the young 
 in America one would think that Whitman 
 was the only man who had ever written 
 poetry in America. Some of the adulation 
 
128 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 is simply sickening. I wish some of our 
 modern poets would stop quoting what 
 Whitman thought about art and life and 
 begin to produce art and life as they see it. 
 This idea of "handing on the torch" is all 
 very fine but I have a lot more respect for 
 a man who goes out to the pine wood and 
 yanks off and lights his own. I should say 
 to the modern American poet in general, 
 break away, break away, get out and exer 
 cise your own soul, refuse to be smothered 
 to death in a clique, a group, a theory. Keep 
 the law of the outlier! It is well that you 
 should have to make yourself more or less 
 useful to the community, but keep your work 
 your own. Play it lone-handed, possibly 
 wrong-headed, but keep your work free, 
 individual, more than a thing of barter, 
 quite outside and unafraid of styles or fash 
 ions or popular applause or the lack of it. 
 The poet has usually saved his soul in that 
 way alone. 
 
 Mr. Joyce Kilmer is known as a poet, 
 
THE IDEALISTS 129 
 
 critic and essayist. And one of the distinc 
 tive qualities of his writings is its discovery 
 of the beauty and the spirituality of common 
 life. And he finds a spiritual awakening to 
 be the most important current in contempor 
 ary poetry. 
 
 I am not an enthusiastic student of liter 
 ary movements, believing that literature ex 
 ists independent of schools and cults and 
 coteries, and for the most part uninfluenced 
 by them. But I believe that a certain change 
 is coming over the philosophies and attitudes 
 toward life of those who make our poems 
 and stories, and perhaps an attempt to de 
 scribe this change will be considered an an 
 swer to your question. 
 
 The literature of America, like the litera 
 ture of all the rest of the world, is progress 
 ing away from materialism toward idealism. 
 Our writers are becoming aware of the fact 
 that the subject of the greatest literature 
 must be the soul of man, which is the most 
 interesting thing in the world. The day of 
 
130 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 pessimism and atheism and pseudopaganism 
 in literature is past. A poet who today de 
 voted his energies to attacking Christianity, 
 as Swinburne did, would be unable to find 
 a publisher. Paganism is as dead as ping- 
 pong or as a bit of the slang of nineteen hun 
 dred and six. 
 
 Of course, there are a few writers who are 
 archaic and reactionary. Mr. Theodore 
 Dreiser is a reactionary clinging, as he does, 
 to methods that were considered startling in 
 Zola s day. But Mr. Dreiser s books are 
 read only by people who are paid for the task 
 by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. 
 Miss Amy Lowell is a reactionary, because 
 she is still writing and talking about Ima- 
 gism a fad popular among a few of the 
 younger London poets back in nineteen thir 
 teen. But no one reads Miss Lowell s writ 
 ings I have too much respect for her good 
 taste to believe that she herself reads them. 
 And these two writers are living anachro 
 nisms, not actually related to the literature 
 of our day. 
 
THE IDEALISTS 131 
 
 In the United States, we have so far es 
 caped the stern discipline of the War, but 
 our writers seem, nevertheless, to have 
 learned their lesson from it. They have seen 
 the handwriting on the wall of the world. 
 When Rupert Brooke thanked God for the 
 cleansing red flood of battle, when he re 
 joiced in the re-birth of honor and courage 
 and faith and for the passing of "half -men 
 and their dirty songs and dreary, and all the 
 little emptiness of love," I think that he 
 spoke for all the writers of the world for 
 those of the United States as well as for 
 those of Europe. The late Emile Verhgeren 
 exemplified the same renascence of idealism 
 when he wrote his noble poem on the shell 
 ing of Rheims Cathedral. He lamented the 
 desecration of the cathedral not because it 
 was a magnificent piece of architecture but 
 because it was a holy place. This feeling in 
 the heart of a man who for years had been 
 counted among the enemies of religion was 
 greatly significant. It was not until the 
 churches were actually under fire that the 
 
132 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 "intellectuals" of Europe knew their value. 
 And the writers of America are getting this 
 lesson at second hand. 
 
 Of course our greatest living writers have 
 always been idealists the Germans did not 
 need to cross Belgian soil to discover to them 
 their own souls. In the work of Anna 
 Hempstead Branch, Edith Thomas, Louise 
 Imogen Guiney and our other poets of au 
 thentic calling, there has always been a 
 radiant idealism, a joyous recognition of life 
 transcending life. Impressionistic critics 
 call E. A. Robinson a pessimist, but the 
 careful student of his poetry knows that it 
 consists merely of a series of intensely inter 
 esting and beautifully phrased questions, all 
 having the same answer, that answer being 
 God. Those of our prose writers who have 
 achieved most success who have been most 
 widely read and are most likely to continue 
 to be read, are idealists. Imagine what 
 worse-than-Zola O. Henry would have writ 
 ten, could he, like Zola, have seen only flesh 
 and blood and brains ! But he was a student 
 
THE IDEALISTS 133 
 
 of the souls of men and women, and, there 
 fore, he will be read by generations who 
 never will hear the names of Artzibasheff s 
 American imitators. 
 
 And since nineteen fourteen there has been 
 noticeable in the literature produced in this 
 country, especially in the poetry, a sort of 
 spiritual frankness that is an encouraging 
 sign. I think that the publication of Mar- 
 jorie Pickthall s "Mary Shepherdess," in 
 Scribner s for Christmas nineteen fifteen, of 
 Margaret Widdemer s "The Old Road to 
 Paradise," in one of Mr. Hearst s most 
 widely circulated magazines, and perhaps of 
 the long poem by Ridgeley Torrence in 
 Scribner s for December, nineteen sixteen, 
 are startling signs of the times. Much water 
 much blood-stained water has flowed 
 under the bridge since Professor Henry 
 Augustin Beers wrote that nine days won 
 der, "The Dying Pantheist," or whatever it 
 was called. No magazine of reputation 
 would print that poem today. 
 
 I do not think that writers lead the 
 
134 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 thought of their time, I think that they re 
 flect and interpret it. The world today is 
 forgetting all its fads and isms and pictur 
 esque heresies and returning to its primitive 
 faith. Francis Thompson predicted this, 
 years ago in his strange and beautiful poem 
 "Lilium Regis." Our writers except those 
 who willfully separate themselves from the 
 life around them are recording and ex 
 plaining and celebrating this return which is 
 a most glorious advance. 
 
 Miss Josephine Preston Peabody is catK- 
 olic in allowing the poet all freedoms. She 
 finds the most significant tendency of mod 
 ern poetry in its rediscovery of the spirit 
 through suffering. 
 
 1. Is there a new movement in poetry 
 today in this country? 
 
 No. I should say there is an eddy. It is 
 related to movement, or progress, as a side- 
 eddy is related to the main current of a river. 
 That is to say: To my mind all real progress 
 
THE IDEALISTS 135 
 
 in art or life means a wider and intenser con 
 sciousness. For that, two things are indis 
 pensable: analysis and synthesis. There is 
 a new style (not movement) in poetry which 
 represents the analytic element, with its joy 
 in the discovery or re-discovery of certain 
 tools of poetic expression, not apparently 
 ready to its mind or hand, before. The syn 
 thetic impulse which would relate this new 
 impulse to the past (and which will, in timey 
 seems to be lacking at present to most of the 
 prophets of the New Style. 
 
 I call this an eddy, because it is incident 
 to the natural growth and onwardness of 
 poetry; also because I think its chief use is 
 Disturbance ; Disturbance as a stimulus. In 
 other words, the animated contention over all 
 the terms of poetry which of late has filled 
 so much space in the magazines, has also 
 served to set many persons (disinterested 
 and uninterested) questioning poetry, what 
 the thing may be; even as, while the world 
 endures, any indication of a street-fight will 
 draw a crowd. 
 
136 THE L YOUNG IDEA 
 
 2. What are its ideals? 
 
 Its ideals, I should say, as far as ideals are 
 shareable among any company of human be 
 ings, are precisely the ideals that have moved 
 men to expression since time began: viz., 
 the sense of Life ; the passion to express Life, 
 as it is or as it feels ; the deep disinclination 
 to take Life at hearsay; and an abounding 
 enthusiasm for the newest tools that suits 
 the hand of the craftsman. 
 
 The differences from this generality must 
 be set forth by the exponents of "New 
 Style." My own and only source of dis 
 agreement with prophets of this particular 
 freedom, is my conviction that they are not 
 free enough ; and that they will allow no man 
 freedoms of his own. 
 
 3. What relation does it bear to the imme 
 diate past?^ 
 
 The belief that it is a revolution. As a 
 matter of fact, it would seem to be a very 
 
THE IDEALISTS 137 
 
 natural activity, having its freshest roots in 
 the rousing challenge of Walt Whitman, 
 enriched and stimulated of late, by the 
 craftsmanship, and the joy in their secret, 
 of several striking French artists and their 
 able fellows, here and in England. 
 
 4. Which of many currents seem to you 
 the most important? 
 
 I think there are not many currents. 
 There are many individuals; there are even 
 more individualists. Setting aside all minor 
 confusions of method and manner, the gen 
 eral movement of poetry still divides, as art 
 has always done (where there is division) 
 and Man has always done, when he has felt 
 as a house divided against itself, into body 
 and soul. Normally or synthesized, the Man 
 is one. But these eddies of consciousness 
 make twain of him very naturally ; and in our 
 own country at present, the two currents of 
 artistic ideal express this temporary parting. 
 One takes account of Man chiefly through 
 his soul, as we still find it useful to call 
 
138 THE L YOUNG IDEA 
 
 the Live-Thing- Within, that makes him 
 walk and see. The other deals with the ex 
 ternals, the passing chances, the things 
 walked by, the things seen; taking no ac 
 count or rather, trying not to take account 
 of that Live-Thing- Within, the seer. 
 
 Naturally, the Live-Thing- Within seems 
 to me the thing which gives significance as 
 well as sight to the man; to his limner, and 
 to the tools chosen by that fellow-workman 
 to carry out his design. 
 
 Even the most contentious artists are apt 
 to agree that Art interprets Life. They 
 disagree perpetually as to what Life may be ; 
 and as to the variety and fitness of one an 
 other s tools. 
 
 But, inasmuch as present-day life is dis 
 covering to Europe, through suffering, the 
 soul it had come to doubt, I think the most 
 significant Art of today is the art that bears 
 witness to this suffering, this discovery, this 
 painful birth of a triumphing Spirit. 
 
 5. What relation does your own work bear 
 to this new movement? 
 
THE IDEALISTS 139 
 
 r A merely human relation: inasmuch as all 
 sincere and unified work is a spontaneous 
 growth of one s own spirit, regardless of 
 what others are doing or are like to do. Ar 
 tistic beliefs are as different in color as re 
 ligions; and there are as many religions as 
 there are individuals. 
 
 I am for all freedoms; even other peo 
 ple s. I am also for all manner of symme 
 tries, rhythms, and musics (overflowing with 
 delight for me) that might strike other minds 
 as bonds for them. A new method seems 
 to me preposterous only (but always) when 
 it proposes to "displace" some heritage of 
 beauty, that has survived by virtue of beauty, 
 from the indifferent past. The past, be it 
 noted, is not with us to serve as curator of 
 that heritage, so often referred to by con 
 temporary writers as an archaeological dis 
 play. As if a water-lily must needs displace 
 the rose. 
 
 My working faith is this: To the work 
 man, his choice of tools. To the reader, his 
 own delights. 
 
140 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 6. What is your criticism of present litera 
 ture? 
 
 That is, when it is voice without spirit? 
 
 Too little heart for Real Life, in spite of 
 the flourish of trumpets. Too little courage 
 to face the mysteries of the dark, with so few 
 earnings in its pocket. No real fortitude; 
 or little. Struggle it can bear, and welcome ; 
 but not silence or solitude. It can attack: 
 it cannot face a siege. It is rich in bragging 
 body. It is feeble of vision. 
 
 I might sum up all, with a flouting word 
 of little-sister brevity: "Talk less. Sing 
 
 more." 
 
 Mr. Ridgely Torrence likewise finds us to 
 be in a period of spiritual regeneration. 
 And he points out that unless vision con 
 trols the poet, his work is worthless. 
 
 Surely there can be but one ideal and that 
 must be held by each individual writer, 
 namely: to express the truth that is in him 
 or her. 
 
THE IDEALISTS 141 
 
 A time of visions and renewed faith is be 
 ginning faintly to dawn and this is not un- 
 rumoured among Americans. 
 
 If there are many "currents" in this 
 "movement," I am not concerned with which 
 is the most important, I am only interested 
 in what a writer has to say. If he has, in the 
 highest sense, something to say, he will not 
 reveal it until it has been wholly fused in the 
 fires of his heart and imagination and then 
 it will be expressed in its inevitable and per 
 fect form. One might pursue this, but a sin 
 gle example will serve: Emerson knew but 
 one or two tunes, and those doggerel ones, 
 but by virtue.of his burning secret his penny 
 pipes gave forth a glorious poetry, the dis 
 tilled essence of song. 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 
 
IV 
 THE PESSIMISTS 
 
 PESSIMISM, we are told by the Standard 
 Dictionary, is a disposition to take a gloomy 
 view of affairs. No other word so closely 
 approximates the attitude taken by these 
 four writers toward our contemporary liter 
 ature. One tells us that today we are upon 
 the eve of birth, and implies that the con 
 temporary movement in literature is the first 
 evidence of a future parturition, but that, of 
 itself, it has accomplished nothing. Another 
 tells us that there is nothing to distinguish 
 American literature from English literature. 
 And both of the remaining two see no evi 
 dence of any significant movement in the 
 writing that is being done today. 
 
 Mr. Benjamin DeCasseres explains his 
 145 
 
146 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 own work. And he tells us what is wrong 
 with our literature. 
 
 There is undoubtedly a new movement 
 in our literature today. We are on the 
 eve of Birth. There are no ideals that 
 I can perceive. It is wildly spontaneous, 
 individualistic and anarchic. Its relation 
 to the immediate past will, I think, be 
 a complete demolition of the stupidities 
 and puritanism that have ossified us and 
 petrified us. Its watchword will be Liberty. 
 My own work is destructive and bears no re 
 lation to the past American literature. As 
 I am an imaginative ironist and a mystical 
 pessimist, my roots are in the Latin civiliza 
 tion of Europe, though I count among my 
 forebears Poe and Walt Whitman. 
 
 Imagination, irony and the superb amoral 
 ism of Greece that is what my work stands 
 for, and it is that that I hope to see dominate 
 the Coming Age in this country. The nine 
 vital books (poetry, essay, satire, short stor 
 ies, epigrams, philosophical paragraphs and 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 147 
 
 confessions) which I have written, and which 
 no publisher as yet will publish, are, because 
 of their rejection, an indictment against the 
 enormous stupidity of the status quo here in 
 America. My own work is epochal in Amer 
 ican literature; but I cannot compete with 
 the hopeless sissification of our college-rid 
 den publishing houses and magazines. 
 
 Today the symbol of American literature 
 should be a teething ring ; tomorrow I hope it 
 will be two eagles ridden by Lucifer and 
 Aphrodite. 
 
 Mr. Floyd Dell, one of the editors of 
 The Masses, claims that we have no truly 
 national literature. 
 
 (1) "Our literature" if you mean by 
 that American literature, there isn t any 
 such thing as distinguished from English 
 literature. In the United States, the maga 
 zine has a more powerful and more dis 
 astrous influence than in England, where 
 fiction is still written for readers of 
 
148 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 books. But there are signs that Amer 
 ican fiction is bursting its magazine bounds. 
 The most significant influence upon Ameri 
 can writing seems to be the example of H. G. 
 Wells and the half dozen other Englishmen 
 who are trying to draw true pictures of life. 
 (2) The ideal of the newer kind of writers 
 in this country is to depict America as they 
 see it a sufficiently good ideal, and one 
 that, fortunately, the magazines are pretty 
 much in sympathy with. (3) "The imme 
 diate past," I take it, is the historical novel. 
 It was, I suppose, Frank Norris who ushered 
 in the new era. Our relation to the historical 
 novel past consists in our having grown up. 
 But why try to create "periods"? There 
 have nearly always been people in the United 
 States who tried to tell the truth about what 
 they saw. (4) If there must be "currents," 
 let us say there is a current setting toward 
 "style" and another current setting toward 
 "journalism." I am in sympathy with the 
 latter. (6) American fiction seems to me in 
 the main too morally provincial. 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 149 
 
 Mr. Donald Marquis is a poet who is also 
 a novelist and satirist. His own modest ap 
 praisal of his work does not do it justice. 
 His "Cruise of the Jasper B.," and espe 
 cially his "Hermione," a collection of satiric 
 essays upon the contemporary mind, are de 
 lightful contributions to our recent writing. 
 His column, "The Sun Dial," in the New 
 York Evening Sun, offers an asylum to 
 many young poets, and is an excellent ex 
 ample of the new literary current in Ameri 
 can journalism. 
 
 (1) There are many experiments, fads, 
 imitations of European authors, minor inno 
 vations, but I see nothing of sufficient bulk 
 or significance to deserve being called the 
 new movement; or in the sense that the Im 
 pressionist painters inaugurated a new move- 
 ment, or in the sense that Wagner s music 
 was new movement. 
 
 This also disposes of questions 2, 3 and 4. 
 
 (5) My own work doesn t amount to a 
 tinker s dam in relation to anything import- 
 
150 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 ant. I m only getting started, and have a 
 disinclination towards kidding myself. 
 
 (6) Contemporary American literature 
 is all right . . . what there is of it. If I 
 had a sure recipe for making more of it, I 
 wouldn t tell anybody; I d use the recipe in 
 my business. But there are no recipes, and 
 can be none. There are only men who have 
 power, and men who lack power. The men 
 who lack power cluster around the men who 
 have power . . . and that is all a movement 
 is. 
 
 Mr. John Curtis Underwood is a poet and 
 critic. He bases his adverse criticism of our 
 contemporary literature upon certain condi 
 tioning factors in our national life which he 
 believes to be responsible for making our 
 psychology what it is. 
 
 In "The Research Magnificent," H. G. 
 Wells has said something about an imagi 
 nary effort to organize the best thought of 
 the world through the mediums of special- 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 151 
 
 ized effort and printing house propaganda. 
 In an earlier novel he has laid stress on an 
 insistent need for "resonators," people of 
 normal intelligence and culture capable in 
 one way or another of receiving and trans 
 mitting human progress in terms of art and 
 science and socialized and efficient good will. 
 During the last three or four years, progress 
 in these directions in North America, taken 
 as a whole, seems to me backward rather than 
 forward. 
 
 Any trend of thought and feeling as vast 
 in its superficial extent, as barren in its posi 
 tive results, so far, cannot be judged, con 
 demned or inspired independently of the en 
 vironment that produces it and which it re 
 flects, however trivially and commercially. 
 It cannot be judged constructively without 
 some taking of contributing testimony from 
 its sister arts of the drama, the moving pic 
 ture and American book and magazine illus 
 tration, popularly patronized and exploited 
 from Broadway to Los Angeles. It cannot 
 continue to be written and printed (not even 
 
152 THE .YOUNG IDEA 
 
 by its rarest and strongest; its finest and 
 most efficient producers and distributors) 
 free from the inevitable reaction upon it of 
 the manners and customs, the commercial 
 and civic immorality, the mean average in 
 telligence and the culture rudimentary or 
 otherwise of the millions who read, as well 
 as the hundreds or the thousands who write 
 or who edit. It cannot continue to represent 
 and misrepresent the incompatible national, 
 pacificistic and socialistic ideals variously in 
 dulged in by 100,000,000 people loosely 
 grouped together by conventional legal and 
 police protection without abandoning, sooner 
 or later, one very traditional and American 
 attitude of academic neutrality toward the 
 problems of the masses and the classes in 
 America (which very definitely includes 
 Mexico today) and the rest of the world on 
 the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific 
 Oceans. 
 
 For the vast majority of the American 
 public who indirectly produce and modify 
 American journalism and literature today as 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 153 
 
 no publisher s following or look to local co 
 terie ever has done or will do, the literary 
 center of America continues to be the hotel, 
 railroad station and street corner newsstand, 
 quite as definitely and extravagantly as it 
 did more than three years ago when the fol 
 lowing paragraphs of the preface to my Lit 
 erature and Insurgency were written. 
 
 Criticism of literature per se is a lost art 
 in America today. Tomorrow or the day af 
 ter it will come back as an exact science and 
 part of a constructive insurgent revolt 
 against machine-made and slipshod condi 
 tions in literature and in the life that litera 
 ture interprets. 
 
 Any American criticism that is fit to sur 
 vive or worthy of the name, must recognize 
 that authors, editors, publishers, malefactors 
 of great and lesser circulation and all their 
 works, are to be classed essentially as prod 
 ucts of environment and forces that react on 
 the same, and so dealt with. 
 
 The fact that muck-raking has been made 
 profitable and that our muck-raking maga- 
 
154 THE L YOUNG IDEA 
 
 zines have proved their fitness to survive and 
 to adapt themselves to American needs and 
 ideals of today, represents the most import 
 ant economic advance of the last fifty years. 
 
 Sooner or later in the present campaign 
 of education, in the new reorganization and 
 realignment of our mental and moral as 
 sets and liabilities, our present system of lit 
 erary and journalistic production and dis 
 tribution is due to come in for its full share 
 of muck-raking and constructive criticism. 
 
 The series of articles on The American 
 Newspaper, by Will Irwin, published in 
 Collier s Weekly during the summer of 1911, 
 sufficiently foreshadows this tendency. A 
 similar series of articles on The American 
 Magazines by an author of equal reputa 
 tion., inspired by an equal passion for speak 
 ing the truth without fear or favor to any 
 one, might prove quite as much to the point. 
 
 If our journalism, like the machine poli 
 tics that it represents, is our most crying na 
 tional disgrace today ; if numbers of our yel 
 lowest journals and the smuggest and most 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 155 
 
 conventionally respectable of the American 
 press "higher up" are the mouthpieces of 
 Big Business, and directly or indirectly its 
 paid prostitutes and liars, the very cynicism 
 of their open immorality has served to di 
 vert public attention from other vital fac 
 tors in the formative processes of American 
 thought and literary and social morality, 
 that in the long run cannot and will not 
 be disregarded. 
 
 Any office boy that reads and reflects, that 
 has any adequate sense of literary values in 
 the up-to-date output of the American pub 
 lic library and magazine world, that has any 
 real appreciation of the editorials and the 
 best fiction in both The Popular Magazine 
 and The Saturday Evening Post; can, if so 
 inclined, frankly characterize and criticise 
 the woman - produced - read - and - catered - to - 
 literature of the day and hour in America, in 
 terms that might well make Washington Ir 
 ving, Lowell, Lanier, Emerson and Haw 
 thorne turn over in their graves and gasp. 
 
 At the same time it takes a social and lit- 
 
156 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 erary vivisector of the first order like David 
 Graham Phillips to reveal the pretenses and 
 the posturings of the "good" woman of 
 America the conscious and unconscious lit 
 erary and artistic snobbery of the socially 
 eligible and refined partners, wives, mothers, 
 daughters and sisters of our most prominent 
 malefactors of great wealth, and their subor 
 dinates and trade rivals for exactly what 
 they are worth. 
 
 Poetry that is real, that is fit to survive 
 through the centuries, needs no defence. 
 Like truth, the very vital color of whose voice 
 it is, it rises triumphant from each defeat 
 to summon men and women to greater 
 heights of aspiration, to greater intensities 
 and charities of common humanity shared 
 and exalted. Such poetry is ready for the 
 making in America today. Great poetry 
 like all great literature is born of storm and 
 stress in the individual or the community. 
 
 There never was a time in the history of 
 
 *^j 
 
 the world when the material of such poetry, 
 so rich and complex in its color scheme, so 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 157 
 
 potent and vital in its content and inspira 
 tion, lay so close at hand beneath the eyes too 
 blind to see it, as in America, the melting 
 pot of the nations, today. 
 
 And there never was a century in the his 
 tory of man s long struggle upward from the 
 brute, when the heart and soul of a great na 
 tion were so restlessly expectant of some 
 spiritual message, something of lasting and 
 significant value in prose or verse, to give 
 charm, color and power to the dreariness 
 and debauchery of everyday, workaday ex 
 istence, as the beginning of this Twentieth 
 Century and the present month, week, day 
 and hour of this year of grace in convention 
 ally Christian America. 
 
 Poetry and prose of this order of distinc 
 tion the System that dominates literary 
 America has denied us ; and it is not too much 
 to say that if fifty per cent of our most mis- 
 representative American magazines for the 
 high brow and the man in the street alike 
 and some ninety per cent of their parasites 
 and prostitutes, their numerous head-line 
 
158 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 contributors, could be blotted out of exist 
 ence tomorrow, the American people as a 
 whole would be better rather than worse off. 
 
 This is said in all charity to literary pro 
 ducers, publishers, middlemen, agents, edi 
 tors, and sub-editors who, like their readers, 
 have not the brains, the courage and the ca 
 pacity to free themselves from false posi 
 tions, and who remain equally the victims of 
 the machine rule that today dominates every 
 department of American life and literature. 
 
 Outside the slum and the university, the 
 misdirected and ineffectual energies of our 
 conventional churches, the defective working 
 of our free public educational system, and 
 the tentative efforts of a few public libraries, 
 mental and moral conservatism of the indi 
 vidual and the race is an undiscovered coun 
 try to the mass of the American people 
 today. 
 
 Men like Norris and Phillips have begun 
 to unmask its vistas. The muck-rake maga 
 zines have revealed the exceeding grimness 
 of its frontier. 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 159 
 
 But in general we remain as we have been 
 since the American pioneer learned to dom 
 inate the forest, the prairie, the desert, the 
 mountains and the rivers by machinery, and 
 in turn suffered the machinery that he had 
 evolved to dominate him ; and we exist today 
 a machine-made people, conventionalized, 
 standardized, commercialized as to our food, 
 clothes, houses, homes, offices, factories, 
 theaters; amusements, social wants, pleas 
 ures and obligations; working plans; civic 
 and social responsibilities, local and na 
 tional pride, and its absence or perver 
 sion. 
 
 If a large fraction of the American people 
 are systematically sweated and underfed, 
 underpaid and overcharged, crowded into 
 cars like cattle, and housed in dwellings 
 where noise, dirt, infection and the extremes 
 of heat and cold are variable quantities, al 
 ways to be met and fought with, not in the 
 slums alone; obviously the physical stamina 
 and morals of the race must in the long run 
 suffer, while the mean mental and moral level 
 
160 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 must at the same time be brutalized and de 
 based. 
 
 Today we have our pure food law and its 
 evasions, demonstrations of one sort or an 
 other against the meat trust and the coal 
 trust, and the present perplexities of our 
 public utilities commission. 
 
 Similarly, corporate aggressions against 
 the public domains and organized looting of 
 water, forest, and mineral rights have finally 
 resulted in a national programme of conser 
 vation in things material. 
 
 We have not yet reached the point of de 
 manding a pure thought law, a legal re 
 striction of the yellowest phases of our yel 
 low journalism, or a national movement for 
 the conservation of literary opportunity and 
 reward, and of the comparatively small pro 
 portion of his or her time that the average 
 American can or will devote to any printed 
 matter that is not mere journalism or the 
 news of the day. 
 
 Such a movement is bound to come some 
 time. It will depend when it does come far 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 161 
 
 more on the canons of sound and scientific 
 criticism of literature and life in the largest 
 sense, than on any possible or impossible ar 
 bitrary legal enactment. 
 
 At the same time, if any protective tariff 
 is at all desirable or legitimate at any period 
 of American growth, the details of an amend 
 ment to our national copyright law exacting 
 a national tax in the form of a cumulative 
 royalty on every copyrighted foreign book 
 and serial publication of recent date, and 
 the requirement of copyright registration 
 and similar cumulative royalties in the case 
 of foreign plays produced on the American 
 stage, might be arranged easily enough, once 
 the mass of the American people made up 
 its mind that such a state of things was 
 desirable, and determined to have it. 
 
 Such a remedy might be far from ideal ; at 
 any rate, it could hardly leave American lit 
 erature and the American stage in a worse 
 state than that in which we find them both 
 today. 
 
 It would at least relieve us of the commer- 
 
162 THE L YOUNG IDEA 
 
 cialized immoralities and hysterics of im 
 ported Elinor Glyns and the Marie Corellis, 
 and leave us the power to deal adequately 
 with our own Chamberses and McCutcheons. 
 
 It might reduce local consumption of 
 Materlinck, Shaw and Chesterton. It might 
 at the same time stimulate the production 
 of essentially American playwrights, poets, 
 novelists, essayists and critics. 
 
 It would at least help to stimulate our 
 racial sense of ultimate destiny in the world 
 of thought and of literature, and our national 
 acceptance of the fact that literature, like 
 all other human phenomena, is distinctly a 
 product of environment in the material, as 
 well as the spiritual sense. 
 
 During the last forty months my persua 
 sion of America s immediate emergence to 
 ward ultimate destiny and her general rec 
 ognition of any vital need of the inspiration 
 that poetry and literature in general achieves 
 has been more or less modified. Super 
 ficially, we have gone from bad to worse, by 
 machinery, in world s record time. This may 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 163 
 
 be merely the recurrent and material sag in 
 the wave of human progress, whose crest, 
 even today, demands generations and cen 
 turies of striving toward. This small item 
 on the credit side of the account remains ; in 
 the history of the literature of eve; y lost na 
 tion once worthy to have a history and a lit 
 erature, the period immediately preceding 
 final national decadence and fall was that of 
 the finest flowering of the art and literature 
 in question. This may bel true today of 
 Belgium, also unprepared to a certain ex 
 tent. (In Belgium s case we, like the rest of 
 the world, are still entitled to have our 
 doubts. In our own case, it is hard to believe 
 that Robert W. Chambers, Henry James, 
 Harold Bell Wright, George Sylvester Vie- 
 rick, Gertrude Atherton and Marjorie Ben- 
 ton Cooke any more fully, firmly and finally 
 represent or misrepresent us than William 
 Jennings Bryan, Henry Ford, Woodrow 
 Wilson, Josephus Daniels and Newton D. 
 Baker do.) 
 
 In the meantime, we are assured by publi- 
 
164 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 cists of one brand or another that there is a 
 new movement toward a new and larger free 
 dom in art and literature as well as life. 
 Probably there was some such movement in 
 Babel just before the confusion of tongues 
 was achieved, and the work of the first sky 
 scraper on record was brought to an abrupt 
 conclusion. If our literary and artistic inter 
 pretations have so far failed to measure up 
 to our skyscrapers and their builders, and 
 the builders of the foundations on which 
 those skyscrapers were reared ; it may be the 
 world s loss no less than ours. Again, it may 
 not be. Literary publishers and producers 
 seem to take temporary ebulliences of inter 
 est and inversions of technic in American 
 poetry, like American painting today, en 
 tirely too seriously. One is led to suspect a 
 certain commercialism, not to say cynicism, 
 in certain publishers and art dealers to go 
 no further in this respect. And for the 
 mass of intelligent American readers and 
 appreciators, the new poetry, like the new 
 art in America, which has begun by claim- 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 165 
 
 ing everything (and so assumed a very con 
 siderable burden of proof), has yet, save in 
 the case of sporadic and technical instances, 
 to prove its case. 
 
 More recently, Mr. Louis Untermeyer, 
 for many of whose poems and for much of 
 whose critical information in detail I have 
 a very real respect and regard, makes him 
 self the spokesman of a get-together move 
 ment in American literature Common, 
 Poetry Preferred, which, on the surface at 
 least, has to do with the spirit no less than 
 the letter of the law. He tells us that our 
 thinking is improving architecturally . . . 
 a hundred undermined and rotting formulas 
 have been explored and . . . And poetry, 
 being the most patrician of all the crafts, 
 has at least become democratized. All this 
 and a good deal that follows this in some 
 three thousand words of "a compilation of 
 three causeries which were published in the 
 Review of Reviews, the New York Evening 
 Post and the Chicago Evening Post" which 
 was mailed me late in November this year, 
 
166 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 appears to me to be more in the nature of 
 a rather too optimistic resume than an abso 
 lutely constructive and impartial criticism. 
 At the same time, as Percy Mackaye says, 
 "poetry needs to be advertised." 
 
 I believe that Mr. Untermeyer is sincere 
 and close to the truth when he says: "For 
 poetry is something more than a graceful, 
 literary escape from life. It is a spirited 
 encounter with it." But in his compilation 
 of our poetic assets and personalities in 
 America up to date, and in the general trend 
 of the times, I do not find conclusive evidence 
 that poetry in America today is proportion* 
 ately any nearer to perfection technically or 
 any more of a counsel of perfection in the 
 lives of rich and poor, the masses and the 
 ittuminati^ than it was three years, or a little 
 more than three years, ago. With all due re 
 spect for Mr. Brownell and one or two of the 
 younger men connected with The New Re 
 public and the Seven Arts Magazine and Mr. 
 Untermeyer himself, I do not believe there 
 is a single critic in America today qualified 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 167 
 
 by position and native capacity to interpret 
 American literary tendencies authoritatively 
 any more than there is a single American 
 poet today capable of inspiring and repre 
 senting his generation as Whitman and 
 Pope did theirs. 
 
 Rather than the blurbs and the business of 
 blurbing, the American people, its poets and 
 other authors today need a little sound sense 
 and salutory humility in esteeming accur 
 ately and impartially their approximate im 
 portance in the cosmic scheme of things. 
 
 Talma said to Rachel once: "A little sor 
 row is what you need, my child, to make of 
 you a great actress." But the American 
 nation today needs more. 
 
 More than a hundred years ago Alexander 
 Pope wrote: "A little knowledge is a dan 
 gerous thing," and failed to realize just how 
 little the little learning easily come by of 
 the machine, of the public school, of the pub 
 lic library, of the typical American daily 
 morning and evening paper and monthly 
 magazine would have for us today. 
 
168 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 If American literature in the last fifty 
 years of easy money since our Civil War 
 has not made good as Russian literature has 
 in the lives of Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoiev 
 sky, Gogol, Gorki, Andreyev and their con 
 temporaries, in the permanent products of 
 organized human thought and emotion, it is 
 true that Russian literature, like Russian 
 life, fights and bleeds today for freedom and 
 racial expression, and in the fighting and 
 bleeding is finding herself. 
 
 Russia out of her Nihilists and her ikons 
 and the blind urge toward light of her masses 
 has achieved a national literature that voices 
 a national soul. In the meanwhile, we have 
 manufactured and exploited the literature of 
 the advertising page and porter, the market 
 report, the society column, the yellow jour 
 nal, the yellower magazine, the telephone 
 book, the motor blue book, the Christian Sci 
 ence reading room, the feminist and pacifist 
 propaganda, the Congressional Record and 
 the moving picture scenario. We have also 
 produced an Anthony Comstock and his 
 
THE PESSIMISTS 169 
 
 successor, the lady novelist, the newer school 
 of feminism in fiction, the sporting page and 
 Sunday supplement cartoon serial, the 
 motor art catalogue, the prospectus of the 
 hotel and the train de luxe, and the publish 
 er s blurb. 
 
 Under all these more or less superficial 
 passions in print and signs of the times it 
 may be that the soul of America is still 
 dumbly and passionately awake, still 
 urgently striving through the richest mate 
 rial for prose and verse that any nation has 
 ever known toward something like adequate 
 and inspiring national expression. It may 
 be that among our young men already be 
 ginning to be known there is another Frank 
 Norris, another David Graham Phillips, an 
 other Stephen Crane, another William 
 Vaughn Moody in the making. It may be, 
 but the signs of the times say otherwise. 
 
 If the American Democracy today is fun 
 damentally more than a counterfeit democ 
 racy of pretence, on a paper basis expressed 
 in notes to Germany and the voice of the 
 
170 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 press-agent everywhere, if it is anything 
 more than the scum of the world s melting 
 pot, all these matters will arrange themselves 
 racially in time. 
 Otherwise not. 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS 
 
 THE point of view of the six authors who 
 have been grouped here as traditionalists re 
 ceives its fullest explanation in the essay con 
 tributed by Mr. Ledoux. They unite in 
 believing that contemporary poetry has 
 discovered no new beauty to us, that its cHief 
 emphasis has been put upon matters of tech 
 nique which, when all is said and done, are 
 neither new nor of compelling importance. 
 They feel that our life is unorganized and 
 chaotic, and that the lack of form in which 
 it has found expression interprets nothing 
 essentially enduring. In contrast to the 
 poets who seek to react to those phases of 
 experience which are peculiarly of our own 
 time, and which give life here and now in 
 173 
 
174 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 America those qualities which distinguish it 
 from the past, the traditionalists assert that 
 the fundamental truths of life are change 
 less, and that it is the poet s business to deal 
 with eternal truths, and that a work of art 
 which is concerned chiefly with what is 
 contemporary must be truly vital to sur 
 vive the passing away of its temporary 
 allusion. 
 
 Mrs. Fannie Stearns Gifford is well known 
 as a writer of charming lyrics. 
 
 It seems to me that in Poetry, as in the 
 other arts, there cannot be any real novelty. 
 Poetry is like a great fact of Nature. The 
 Force of Gravity remains the same forever. 
 There is nothing new about it except the new 
 discoveries that may be made as to its 
 powers ; the new application of its powers to 
 the uses of life. 
 
 So Poetry is never old, and never new. 
 Its struggle is the ancient one to breathe the 
 wind of spiritual beauty and undying truth 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 175 
 
 into material transiencies. The only real 
 question about Poetry is not whether it uses 
 regular rhythms and rhymes, or odd free 
 forms; not whether it interprets its sub 
 jects directly or by remote suggestions, but 
 whether it is Poetry or not, by any of the 
 final tests. These tests are most difficult to 
 define or describe, but they include the quali 
 ties of beauty, power and truth in all their 
 familiar and unfamiliar phases. 
 
 The "New Poetry" of which one hears so 
 constantly today seems to me an attempt, 
 sometimes sincere, sometimes meritricious, to 
 express the restless and troubled spirit of 
 the age in restless and unrestrained forms. 
 Its novelty consists in only one element: its 
 emphasis on the freedom of the poet to use 
 matter and manner hitherto dogmatically 
 banned as "unpoetical." 
 
 But the task (or joy) of the Poet is un 
 changed. A painter whose palette has held 
 only dim neutral tints may discover wild 
 blues and greens and reds free for his use, 
 but his problems will not be new nor his 
 
176 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 powers heightened. A poet in a paradise of 
 bizarre imaginings and untrammelled verse 
 must still see and speak according to his own 
 vision, or he is not poet at all. 
 
 It is difficult for me to classify Poetry; 
 and when I find it classified, a curious revul 
 sion sweeps over me, and I am inclined to 
 echo Gamaliel s words: 
 
 "If this counsel be of men, it will come to 
 naught ; but if it be of God, ye cannot over 
 throw it." 
 
 All new movements in Poetry or in life 
 must finally be left to the same impartial 
 judgment. 
 
 My own verse has, I think, no relationship 
 to any movement. It is made up of echoes 
 of other people s poetry, and of my own 
 chance imaginings. In form it belongs 
 clearly to the "old" type, for I like the music 
 of almost song-like rhythms and cadences. 
 It is, for me, a highly personal possession, 
 somewhat like the clothes I make for myself 
 or the flowers I try to grow, both in interest 
 and in negligibility. 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 177 
 
 But, fortunately, other American poets 
 have a higher idealism and a broader calling. 
 The work of Josephine Preston Peabody is 
 to me representative of the best type of 
 Poetry that America is writing now. Her 
 alert, human sympathy, her vision of high, 
 unfading truth, and her powers of beautiful 
 song, satisfy more honest and deep demands 
 than any of the so-called "New" schools of 
 verse. There are other poets with the same 
 ideals, if not the same ways of expressing 
 them. 
 
 A man must have Air, and Water, and 
 Sleep, and Work, and Love, over and over 
 and over. Like all those great simplicities, 
 Poetry is Poetry, over and over and over. 
 
 Mr. Louis V. Ledoux has found his in 
 spiration chiefly in Greek legend. His most 
 recent volume, "The Story of Eleusis," is 
 a poetic drama of great beauty and deep 
 spiritual vision. His essay is important as 
 a criticism of the new spirit in our poetry 
 from the viewpoint of a conservative, 
 
178 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 The history of art, like the history of any 
 thing else, is the record of cycles of bloom 
 and decay. The course of literature is a 
 series of movements which are like the slow 
 swinging of some great pendulum, or would 
 be like it were there not present in art, as 
 in life, a gradual evolution which makes any 
 cycle, any one swing of the pendulum, a little 
 different from its predecessor and renders 
 the image inexact. What happens in art is 
 like, in a smaller way, what happens in na 
 ture: earth moves through a perpetual re 
 currence of Spring and Autumn from some 
 beginning of which we know little to some 
 end of which we know nothing at all; but 
 in this apparent repetition there is a com 
 paratively unapparent growth, a principle 
 of change that can only be observed in a 
 series of centuries. The pendulum swing of 
 literature is easier to follow than is its evo 
 lution. 
 
 There are only a limited number of great 
 ideas, or distinctive mental and emotional 
 attitudes toward life, and these are period- 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 179 
 
 ically discovered by new generations of 
 artists just as each new generation of chil 
 dren discovers for itself certain facts of life 
 which come to them with the force of a pre 
 viously withheld revelation. Some one prob 
 ably had announced the return to nature 
 idea before Longus wrote "Daphnis and 
 Chloe," and when time was ripe Rousseau, 
 Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateaubriand and 
 the others of that age discovered it again; 
 soon, when the force that was in Walt Whit 
 man has been spent, some one will rean- 
 nounce the return to nature, and the an 
 nouncement will be of as much value and 
 novelty to the new generation as that made 
 by Longus was to the one in which he lived. 
 Just now in America there is a tendency to 
 consider the life of the laboring classes 
 the comparatively uneducated and unpros- 
 perous the best material for poetry; the 
 pendulum is where it was when Crabbe wrote 
 his Tales of village life and Wordsworth 
 gave English literature a "new" subject, and 
 precisely where it was when the poets and 
 
180 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 sculptors of third century Greece were pro 
 ducing statuettes of fagot-gatherers bowed 
 beneath their burdens and writing idylls and 
 comedies about the problems of the prole 
 tariat. 
 
 Much has been said lately about what is 
 called "the new poetry," the claim of novelty 
 being based apparently on three things: 
 First, the predilection for subjects taken 
 from the life of what used to be the lower 
 classes and the interest in social problems 
 seen from the point of view of the oppressed 
 or unfortunate; second, the fondness for 
 distinctively contemporary and probably 
 ephemeral adjuncts such as the sky-scraper 
 and the Ford car; and third, the develop 
 ment of a new form of expression necessi 
 tated by the newness of the thing to be ex 
 pressed,. The validity of the first claim has 
 been somewhat inadequately discussed al 
 ready, and of the second it may be said that 
 the use of contemporary adjuncts does more 
 to militate against the endurance of a work 
 of art than anything else could ; only a poem 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 181 
 
 of extraordinary vitality can live under such 
 a burden. A lesser poet than Dante could 
 not have survived the amount of contempo 
 rary scientific achievement and political dis 
 sension that makes the Divine Comedy a 
 happy pasture for the Scholiast; but a more 
 simple instance may be drawn from Aristo 
 phanes. No author is more filled than he 
 with contemporary and local allusions ; to un 
 derstand half of what his original audience 
 got from him it is necessary to master a vol 
 ume of footnotes greater than that of the 
 text, but no one except an antiquarian would 
 read Aristophanes for the things in his work 
 that were primarily of contemporary im 
 portance. One of his plays opens somewhat 
 as follows I am quoting from memory and 
 away from my books: 
 
 Which of the old jokes shall I crack, Master? 
 Almost any of them ; the audience is sure to 
 laugh, but for God s sake don t tell the story 
 about So-and-So; that s too old. 
 
 The story about So-and-So is as much of a 
 
182 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 mystery to me as what happened to old 
 Grouse in the gun-room; but that element 
 in the bit of dialogue which is not dependent 
 upon the contemporary point makes the lines 
 for all time a perfect opening for comedy. 
 The admission of a Ford car or a sky-scraper 
 into a poem will tend to diminish rather than 
 to increase its chance of enduring, and con 
 sequently, its value as a work of art. 
 
 The third point upon which the exponents 
 of the "new poetry" base their claim to new 
 ness and, what is of considerably more im 
 portance, to artistic worth, is the form in 
 which they express what they have to say. 
 This is merely a question of technique, and 
 is of little interest to anyone except artisans 
 of the poetic craft. The layman is like a 
 person surrounded by a high board fence on 
 the other side of which are stretches of beau 
 tiful landscape; the business of the poet is 
 to make a hole for him through which he 
 can see the beauty that is beyond, and to the 
 man inside it matters little how the hole is 
 made, the vision is what he needs to have 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 183 
 
 given him. A question of technique would 
 not be mentioned here had not some writers 
 of verse obtruded it ( on public attention, in 
 sisting that holes must be bored with a gim 
 let rather than with an auger, and this must 
 be answered. The view on the other side of 
 the fence is in no way different from what 
 it always has been, and the poet is free to 
 choose whatever tool suits him best ; he must 
 remember, however, that the sole reason for 
 making the hole is to give the man inside 
 a vision that he could not have gotten with 
 out the poetic intermediary. Augers and 
 gimlets are equally useless when the hole is 
 made in a board beyond which there is noth 
 ing, for what the poet says is of infinitely 
 more importance than is the choice of the 
 form in which he chooses to say it. 
 
 The exponents of free-verse have claimed 
 that it was a new development in art, and 
 the validity of this claim must also be dis 
 cussed. There is nothing new about the free- 
 verse of the present except the exaggeration 
 of its use; all competent writers from the 
 
184 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 Greek dramatists downward have introduced 
 metrical variations to avoid monotony, and 
 particularly to produce certain special 
 effects, usually of emphasis. This tend 
 ency to exaggerate a minor point of tech 
 nique is characteristic of contemporary 
 art just as other forms of exaggeration 
 are characteristic of contemporary life; 
 there was a sculptor not long ago who real 
 ized poignantly what everyone had always 
 known, that the human head is shaped more 
 like an egg than it is like an orange and the 
 busts he produced emphasized the ovoid form 
 to the exclusion of all traces of physiognomy. 
 Perfection of form certainly cannot hurt a 
 work of art, and the demand that artistic ex 
 pression should be a primitive rhythmic is 
 based on instinct. 
 
 The other so-called modern schools can all 
 be related to something in the past; Imag- 
 ism, for example, in its practice, if not in its 
 theory, is like an unconscious revival of the 
 Elizabethan conceit. The slopes of Par 
 nassus have always been covered with mush- 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 185 
 
 rooms, but in the restless eagerness and hurry 
 of our life we are prone to rush out into the 
 wilderness after new things, and when the 
 artist out there calls loudly enough about 
 the novelty of his wares, we run to see, for 
 getting the gist of the whole matter, which 
 is this : a new thing, like an old one, may be 
 either worthless or of value; the quality of 
 newness or the reverse that is in it having 
 little or nothing to do with its worth as 
 poetry or as an interpretation of life. A 
 Ford car might be mentioned in a poor poem 
 or a good one, the fact of its mention neither 
 raises nor diminishes the value of the piece, 
 for the things that the poet s vision ought to 
 make him see are things that endure, and 
 these are without necessary localization in 
 time or place as true to San Francisco as 
 to Athens, to New York as to Pekin. The 
 setting of a poem makes little difference. 
 
 America is uncrystallized in its democracy, 
 in its life and, by consequence, in its art; a 
 chaos cannot be expressed or interpreted by 
 crystallized forms and uncrystallized form- 
 
186 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 lessness, while it may express, without art, 
 cannot interpret. The crystal that may ulti 
 mately appear has not yet been defined, and 
 while many contrary tendencies are discern 
 ible, there is no definite indication of the fu 
 ture. The pendulum swings, and after one 
 period follows another ; but in each succes 
 sion there is variation, and the swinging has 
 always been accompanied by a number of 
 eccentric attempts to get away from the 
 track. 
 
 The question as to the relation of my own 
 work to the present state and future pros 
 pects of American poetry is a difficult one 
 to answer. A wave does not go in an oppo 
 site direction to the rest of the sea, and all 
 I can say is that to my mind the essential, 
 enduring things of life being infinitely va 
 ried, it is the business of the poet simply 
 to make his hole in that part of the fence 
 where he believes what he can show to be 
 at its finest, to bring as much of his 
 vision as he can, as much interpretation as 
 he can to the man inside, and to leave ten- 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 187 
 
 dencies on the knees of the gods. I cannot, 
 however, see the advantage of putting the 
 hole in the back of the fence, where only a 
 brick wall will be disclosed, or the neighbors 
 wash which hung out today will tomorrow be 
 gone, when there is the great sweep of hill 
 and valley in front. There are certain things 
 that every one in all time must face, death, 
 for example, and if the poet illumines them 
 he has a better chance of reaching more peo 
 ple for a longer period than if he treats of 
 things in their aspects that have merely tem 
 porary significance for a few. Men die at 
 one place as at another, and in its essentials 
 the problem was the same to the caveman 
 that it is to the factory-worker. What a 
 poet has to say the power and quality of 
 his vision is what counts, and this comes to 
 him from without, or from within, and usu 
 ally is independent of volition ; all he can do, 
 and each for himself alone must strive faith 
 fully to do it, is to express what he finds in 
 him in the best manner that is possible for 
 him to attain. Poetry is not a parlor accom- 
 
188 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 plishment, nor a means of notoriety, and the 
 genuine poet, especially in the America of 
 to-day, is under obligations to others as well 
 as to himself. 
 
 This is not a formal essay; it is merely an 
 attempt to answer the given questions as 
 directly and as concisely as possible; and I 
 have limited what has been said to the sub 
 ject of poetry. Much of what I have tried 
 to bring out, however, can be applied with 
 equal justice to other branches of literature 
 and to other arts, particularly to painting. 
 
 Mr. John G. Neihardt is well known as 
 the author of "The Song of Hugh Glass," 
 "The Quest," several other volumes of verse, 
 two novels, "The Dawn Builder" and "Life s 
 Lure," a volume of short stories entitled, 
 "The Lonesome Trail," and a book of travel, 
 "The River and I." 
 
 During the past six years something over 
 two thousand new books, representing every 
 phase of modern literature, have passed 
 through my hands. About half of these I 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 189 
 
 have read, and the rest I have scanned. I 
 am now reading at the least three represen 
 tative current books every week and scan 
 ning as many more volumes. As a result of 
 this rather strenuous experience I am con 
 vinced that a new movement is indeed mani 
 fest in our literature. As to its ideals, they 
 are, as everybody knows, supposed to be con 
 cerned with democracy. Its relation to the 
 Past is, in general, the relation of a brilliant 
 upstart youth to his dogmatic elders. 
 
 The storm-center of the literary revolt we 
 are now witnessing is undoubtedly in poetry, 
 and for the sake of brevity I prefer to limit 
 my remarks thereto. As I have noted, the 
 "new" poetry is said to be democratic. It is 
 democratic in the sense that nearly everyone 
 seems to be engaged in writing it; for now 
 that the difficulties of the art have been re 
 moved, a long and faithful apprenticeship 
 seems no longer to be necessary. Anyone 
 possessing pen, paper and an assortment of 
 vague emotions may easily qualify. Thus 
 the realm of poetry has been fitted with 
 
190 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 strictly modern improvements. One no 
 longer scales Parnassus; one takes the ele 
 vator. The "new" poetry is democratic also 
 in the sense that the majority of our poets 
 profess to be greatly in love with the Peo 
 ple. Posterity will decide as to how much 
 of this is pose, inspired by that overwraught 
 humanitarianism now so much in vogue. As 
 a reaction against a barren formalism, the 
 "new" poetry will no doubt serve a good 
 purpose in the end. Experimentation is al 
 ways necessary in a universe where rigidity 
 is death. 
 
 But I do not forget, as many of my con 
 temporaries seem to do, that the world did 
 not begin with the present decade ; that world 
 literature is a living thing; that its body is 
 tradition, and that a poet can no more dis 
 pense at will with that tradition than he can 
 dispense with that complex of psychic ten 
 dencies which he inherits from his ancestors 
 and with which, plus his individual experi 
 ences, he must build his own unique person 
 ality. 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 191 
 
 Further, I know, as any student of great 
 poetry must know, that by ignoring the Past 
 the poet deliberately sacrifices the chief 
 source of poetic power. For it is mainly by 
 appealing to memory that poetry works its 
 magic: and the individual memory is too 
 brief, too fragmentary. The racial memory, 
 rich with the distilled experience of countless 
 men and women, is necessary; and racial 
 memory is literary tradition. 
 
 So much for substance. As to method, I 
 am disposed to question those who talk so 
 glibly of "free form" and who apparently do 
 not understand that freedom cannot be real 
 ized except by obedience to unyielding law. 
 I suspect that these "vers librists" confuse 
 the meaning of "freedom" and "license" 
 a confusion characteristic of all so-called 
 "democratic" revolts. I find, also, that as 
 sense of form decreases, vagueness of 
 thought generally increases. 
 
 The key to the situation, it has seemed to 
 me, is generally overlooked. We err in fan 
 cying that democracy is anything more than 
 
192 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 a dream. So far, all that has ever resulted 
 from a so-called "democratic" revolt has been 
 a state of anarchy. We speak of "demo 
 cratic" America; and America is not demo 
 cratic, but individualistic the exact oppo 
 site. Likewise, we speak of a democratic 
 movement in poetry. What we have is an 
 individualistic movement ; and individualism 
 is anarchy. 
 
 From our economic system on up (or 
 down!) to our moral code, we are either in 
 dividualistic or are rapidly drifting in that 
 direction. And that is why we are experi 
 encing an orgy of unsupported individual 
 opinion in nearly every field of human en 
 deavor religion conspicuously included ! 
 We have already repudiated or are tending 
 to repudiate all standards of judgment 
 (which are the result of the accumulated ex 
 perience of the race), and we have set up 
 individual caprice as a guide. For this rea 
 son we have few authoritative critics. 
 
 But I am no pessimist. On the contrary, 
 I have the greatest confidence in the future 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 193 
 
 of American poetry. Already we have some 
 very remarkable poets and others are in the 
 making. The change which will reveal the 
 good and destroy the bad in the new move 
 ment will, it seems to me, be primarily eco 
 nomic and governmental. On the economic 
 side, individualism must be crushed. On the 
 governmental side, there must be a strong 
 centralization of power, bringing back to the 
 people the fine old sense of obedience which 
 we have temporarily lost. Some great na 
 tional danger will probably hasten that in 
 evitable change. Powder smoke might 
 cleanse us. 
 
 Mr. Edward Arlington Robinson, author 
 of "The Town Down the River," "Captain 
 Craig," "The Man Against the Sky," and 
 of a comedy, "Van Zorn," has, perhaps more 
 than any other of our contemporary poets, 
 sought to express an intellectual content in 
 his verse. 
 
 You ask me if I think there is a new move 
 ment in poetry, and my reply is that there 
 
194 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 is always a new movement in poetry. There 
 is always a new movement in everything, in 
 cluding each new inch of each new revolution 
 of the earth around the sun. But if you 
 mean to ask me if this new movement implies 
 necessarily any radical change in the struc 
 ture or in the general nature of what the 
 world has agreed thus far to call poetry, I 
 shall have to tell you that I do not think so 
 knowing very well that my answer is worth 
 no more than that of any other relatively in 
 telligent individual. 
 
 In referring to a new movement I assume 
 that you refer primarily to vers libre a 
 form, or lack of form, that may or may not 
 produce pleasant results. I do not know 
 that there is any final reason why this mode 
 of expression should not give pleasure as 
 often as any other, although I do know, so 
 far as I am concerned, that in the majority 
 of cases it does not. I have read furlongs 
 of it, but the amount that has given me any 
 solid satisfaction could easily be measured 
 in a few yards at the most. I say this with 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 195 
 
 reluctance, for I know that some of my 
 friends will disagree with me entirely, and 
 be tempted in all probability to call me 
 names. Some of them may call me a con 
 servative, others a reactionary; and all this 
 in spite of the fact that I have been accused 
 in the past of being, if anything, too modern. 
 But these accusations were made long ago; 
 and I fancy that my limited public has come 
 by this time to see that I was never so peril 
 ously modern, after all. 
 
 If there be a new movement in poetry 
 that can be definitely labeled, such a move 
 ment will probably be found to have more 
 to do with vocabulary and verbal arrange 
 ment than with metrical or non-metrical 
 form. The poetry of the next few hundred 
 years will in all probability have an incisive- 
 ness and a clarity that have not generally 
 prevailed heretofore, and some of the best of 
 it may be written in vers libre; although my 
 own opinion is that most of the best of it will 
 be written in some form or other that shall 
 have a definite metrical pattern. I may be 
 
196 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 grievously in the wrong, yet it seems to me 
 that up to this time vers libre has been its 
 own worst indictment, in that perhaps less 
 than one per cent of it may be said to pos 
 sess the quality that gives pleasure. In spite 
 of the fact that it has produced several in 
 teresting and stimulating results, I am in 
 clined to the belief that the vers libre move 
 ment has seen its best days, and that the few 
 writers who have succeeded in making it in 
 teresting are still to do their best work along 
 more traditional lines, in which there is room 
 for any amount of innovation and variety. 
 But, as I said before, my opinion is merely 
 that of an individual, possibly prejudiced, 
 and is, therefore, to be taken as such and as 
 nothing more. 
 
 In reply to your request for a criticism of 
 contemporary American literature, perhaps 
 I had better keep to the subject of poetry 
 and express my belief in the genuineness of 
 its "revival" and in the significance of much 
 that has been published during the past few 
 years. 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 197 
 
 Mrs. Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff s most 
 recent volume is "Eris." 
 
 It is my belief that the new movement in 
 modern literature and art is an expression 
 of social democracy, a note of international 
 ism that indicates the attitude of the world 
 today. The European war has brought all 
 nations face to face with the sternest facts 
 of existence, and as a result poetry has be 
 come inoculated with a vigorous realism it 
 is stripped of symbol and romantic sugges 
 tion; flowering artifice having been discarded 
 for sturdier forms of feeling. Huysmans, 
 Zola, Verhaeren and Gide in France, and 
 Masefield in England, have been the progen 
 itors of the present realistic movement in 
 poetry. It satisfies modern cosmopolitan 
 needs; but, in my opinion, it is only an 
 ephemeral current that will be replaced by 
 a reactionary aristocracy in life and letters. 
 Just as from archaic art emerged the efflor 
 escence of Hellenic sculpture, so from 
 Cubism, Imagism and all the various pres- 
 
198 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 ent-day schools there will occur a reversion 
 to intellectual austerity. Art has a temper 
 amental flux that varies with the impulse of 
 the age so ultimately in all countries there 
 must re-arise, as a reflex of modern realism, 
 a more austere technique, a truer emotional 
 ism and a finer spirituality in poetry. The 
 idealism of antiquity will re-awaken to tem 
 per our boisterous modernism, and to tran- 
 quilize the realistic democracy of American 
 art. 
 
 My own work is naturally influenced to a 
 certain degree by the modern impetus but 
 essentially I prefer the artistic ideal of Mar 
 lowe, of Shelley, of Swinburne, of Sophocles, 
 of Milton. But I feel that the student of the 
 classical cannot exempt himself without loss 
 from the modern trend of art which, despite 
 its many unfortunate aspects, is a vigorous 
 infusion of new energies. 
 
 Mr. Thomas Walsh is known for his beau 
 tiful poems dealing with the history and the 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 199 
 
 art of Spain, "The Pilgrim Kings: Greco 
 and Goya, and Other Poems of Spain." 
 
 There is nothing new under the sun, not 
 even today: and it does not seem to me that 
 we have any new elements in our literary 
 production that give any warrant for doubt 
 of the belief that the future will be as the 
 past. The Papal Delegate, Archbishop 
 Bonzano a man of unusual culture 
 summed up our American literature as 
 "plentiful," and his irony reveals the atti 
 tude of the matured scholar in the presence 
 of the clamors of the very young and the 
 very wild. 
 
 There has been a great deal of very dis 
 jointed reasoning regarding the rules of 
 aesthetics that were settled, it seemed, some 
 thousand years ago; and we have beheld in 
 these discussions the results of that modern 
 philosophy which abandons and flouts at 
 any connected relation between the different 
 branches of human knowledge and morals. 
 The young radical of today s letters is the 
 
200 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 natural son of Matthew Arnold and his 
 school, although I think Arnold himself 
 would be rather surprised at the progeny he 
 has produced. The abandonment of law and 
 order in philosophy has merely preceded the 
 abandonment of law and order in the arts. 
 Our young writers are honestly expressing 
 themselves; they are possessed of a lawless 
 sympathy with everything, whether it should 
 have sympathy or not. Mercy has been de 
 clared the most modern virtue in literature, 
 but it seems we have reached a point where 
 it has become stupidity. 
 
 To me the real performances in literature 
 today are very much akin to those of the past 
 generations. There is an added quality of 
 simplicity and sincerity, but the same mate 
 rials and the same general ambitions and 
 spirit. Today our audiences are more mixed 
 and, from an Anglo- Celtic point of view, 
 more alien to the standards that have ruled 
 us in America in the past. Art still remains 
 the expression and the enjoyment of the few 
 who seem fewer today only because of the 
 
TRADITIONALISTS 201 
 
 greatness of the variety of outsiders who are 
 untutored and unprepared for an opinion, 
 not to mention taking a hand in its current 
 production. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 The results of this investigation require 
 little interpretation. Certain conclusions 
 are immediately apparent. There is a sin 
 gular unanimity of opinion with respect to 
 the predominating tendency in our contem 
 porary writing; a return upon life, and, 
 more specifically, upon contemporary Amer 
 ican life, as the subject matter of our writ 
 ing. The younger writers are urging as their 
 claim to attention that they are dealing with 
 the life which they see about them, and of 
 which they are a part, and that they are deal 
 ing with this life in its own terms ; they are 
 quick to perceive the poetic core of common 
 experience, and it is this that they would re 
 veal in their art. They have, in Mr. Unter- 
 meyer s eloquent phrase, discovered the 
 205 
 
206 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 beauty and dignity, and, one might add, the 
 romance of the commonplace. This discov 
 ery is not without its peculiar significance. 
 For, in dealing with the everyday life of our 
 democracy, they are forced to take into ac 
 count the disproportion between its basis in 
 ideality and its functioning in actuality. 
 Thus it is that contemporary literature, and 
 particularly contemporary poetry, is ex 
 pressing a social content. In their primary 
 task of actually living, the poets are discov 
 ering as the foundation upon which rests our 
 national life the articulate masses who are 
 striving for self-expression, and they are ex 
 pressing the thoughts, the feelings, the hopes 
 and the tragedies of these masses in their 
 verse. They are appealing to us less as 
 lovers of art than as lovers of life, they are 
 striving to move our humanity, to arouse a 
 social consciousness. They conceive art as 
 a means of expressing life, and since they are 
 taking as their province the whole of life, 
 they would be bound by no traditional con 
 ceptions of beauty. If we urge against them 
 
CONCLUSION 207 
 
 a preoccupation with the sordid, the violent 
 and the hideous, they will answer us that all 
 these are phases of the life which they are 
 experiencing. And they will show us where 
 in they have been revealing the new beauty 
 which is being evolved in the democracy of 
 labor. They are confident idealists, seeking 
 to reconstruct our life by widening and deep 
 ening our conceptions of experience. In 
 aesthetics, therefore, they are distinctly revo 
 lutionists, revolting against the view that art 
 is a refuge from life and vigorously refusing 
 allegiance to a tradition which they feel 
 would limit not only the content of their art, 
 but the form in which that content is to 
 achieve expression. 
 
 There is, however, in these expressions of 
 opinion less discussion of poetic form than 
 one would naturally expect in a time when 
 our notions of poetic form seem superficially 
 to be undergoing a process of far-reaching 
 and deliberate modification. The emphasis 
 of the poets seems rather to be in the direc 
 tion of content ; it is as though they believed 
 
208 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 that content shapes its own form and that the 
 business of the reader lies with the content 
 of art, and with its form only indirectly, in 
 determining whether the medium of expres 
 sion is the best possible medium for convey 
 ing the particular emotional experience of 
 which it is the vehicle. No one who reads, to 
 choose a striking example, the essay of Mr. 
 Arthur Davison Ficke can doubt that the 
 various metrical experiments of the new 
 schools are less a deliberate program of re 
 form in poetic diction than the logical result 
 of a fresh way of looking at life. 
 
 There is, likewise, a vigorous recognition 
 of an increasing seriousness in outlook 
 among our writers, a disposition to penetrate 
 beneath the merely superficial externalities 
 of life, and to seek for fundamental spiritual 
 values. I have grouped together four poets 
 who have emphasized this spirit most 
 strongly under a single heading, but the bar 
 riers of classification break down upon this 
 question. Mr. Joyce Kilmer, for example, 
 whose work in both poetry and prose reveals 
 
CONCLUSION 209 
 
 as sure a discovery of the romance of the 
 commonplace as does any of the writers 
 grouped under that general heading, believes 
 that the most important tendency in our con 
 temporary literature is its expression of spir 
 itual experience. It would not be just to 
 deny the existence of this tendency in the 
 work of other poets who are not grouped 
 with Mr. Kilmer. It is, perhaps, more hon 
 est to say that the poets are reacting to spir 
 itual experience in the terms of a more 
 homely reality than heretofore. 
 
 The differences existing between the con 
 servatives and the radicals are admirably 
 illustrated by a comparison between the con 
 tributions of Miss Margaret Widdemer and 
 Mr. Louis Ledoux. Miss Widdemer tells 
 us that today the poets are reflecting the atti 
 tude toward life of their own time, and of an 
 experience produced by the special circum 
 stances of life here and now in America. Mr. 
 Ledoux reminds us that the fundamental 
 realities of life are changeless, and that their 
 contemporary attributes are largely tempo- 
 
210 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 rary and ephemeral in their nature. Both, 
 perhaps, would agree upon the eternal na 
 ture of life s great experiences, but Mr. Le- 
 doux has not remarked that the reaction to 
 these experiences is a product of the special 
 conditions of life in the age in which they 
 achieve expression, and thus varies from age 
 to age, while Miss Widdemer s implication 
 is that we live in a peculiarly self-conscious 
 time, and that we are therefore anxious to 
 analyze our individual reactions to life. Mr. 
 Ledoux reproaches contemporary writers 
 for expressing too great an interest in the 
 contemporary aspects of life; Miss Widde- 
 mer tells us that the poet of today is inter 
 ested in just those things which make today 
 different from yesterday, and has no thought 
 of eternity. 
 
 There is, moreover, a further difference of 
 opinion between the Conservatives and the 
 Radicals, centering upon the question of 
 technical innovations. In general, the Con 
 servatives agree that a greater freedom of 
 poetic form will undoubtedly result in an in- 
 
CONCLUSION 211 
 
 fluence for the good upon poetic diction; 
 what they object to is the anarchy of the 
 present. Both Conservatives and Radicals 
 seem to be united in a suspicion of "schools" ; 
 and among all the contributions, only four 
 could with absolute certainty be referred to 
 definite movements. Those of Miss Lowell 
 and Mr. Fletcher belong by right to the 
 Imagist movement, although neither of the 
 poets have discussed the specific tenets of 
 that school in their contributions. Miss Anne 
 Knish, who, with Mr. Emmanuel Morgan, 
 represents the Spectrist group, is slightly 
 contemptuous of our latter-day search for 
 novelty, and explains Spectrism as a fresh 
 interpretation of Classic gospels. Mr. Don 
 ald Evans, whose "Sonnets from the Pata- 
 gonian" resulted in his being credited with 
 the foundation of another school, does not 
 mention its existence, and places his own 
 work as being midway between the Radicals 
 and the Conservatives in temper. 
 
 But although the existence of all sorts of 
 movements is denied, there is, in a wider 
 
212 THE YOUNG IDEA 
 
 sense, a distinct movement in contemporary 
 American letters, having as its basis the com 
 mon ideal of a determination to express a re 
 action to experience in terms of the thoughts 
 and feelings of our own time and country. 
 The methods by which this is being accom 
 plished are largely individual, and are told 
 in the statements of the writers who have re 
 sponded to this investigation of their ideals ; 
 any repetition here would be both redundant 
 and impertinent. Any investigation of this 
 nature must necessarily be incomplete in its 
 results. One cannot mobilize all contempo 
 rary writers for an expression of opinion; 
 there are several whose absence, for one rea 
 son or another, from this volume is heartily 
 to be deplored. But investigations such as 
 this have the virtue of bringing together a 
 number of varied and representative points 
 of view with reference to certain specific 
 questions which are of fundamental import 
 ance in appraising the value of our literary 
 activity. And therefore I believe this little 
 book will have its place in criticism as a rec- 
 
CONCLUSION 213 
 
 ord of the spirit and the ideals and the ideas 
 underlying the work of American writers 
 who are coming into their own in the present 
 day. 
 
 LLOYD R. MORRIS. 
 
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