Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

(Revised and Enlarged Edition)

BY

LOUIS UNTERMEYER

Author of “Challenge,” “Including Horace,” “The New Era in American Poetry,” etc.

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1921, BY

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

THE QUINN & SODEN COMPANY

RAHWAY, N J

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For permission to reprint most of the material in this volume, the editor wishes to thank not only the poets whose coöperation has been of such assistance, but also the publishers, all of whom are holders of the copyright. The indebtedness is alphabetically acknowledged to:

Richard G. Badger—for the poems from Sun and Saddle Leather and Grass-Grown Trails by Badger Clark.

Bobbs-Merrill Company—for two poems from The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley.

Brentano’s—for two poems from Chanteys and Ballads by Harry Kemp.

Nicholas L. Brown—for the poem from Blood of Things by Alfred Kreymborg.

The Century Company—for the selections from Merchants from Cathay by William Rose Benét and War and Laughter by James Oppenheim.

The Century Magazine—for “Lake Song” by Jean Starr Untermeyer.

Dodd, Mead & Company—for the two poems from Lyrics of Lowly Life and one poem from Lyrics of Love and Laughter by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

George H. Doran Company—for the selections from Moons of Grandeur by William Rose Benét, Banners by Babette Deutsch, Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer, and Hide and Seek by Christopher Morley.

Doubleday, Page & Company—for the selections from In Other Words and Tobogganning on Parnassus by Franklin P. Adams, The Man with the Hoe and Lincoln and Other Poems by Edwin Markham.

E. P. Dutton & Company—for the selections from The Vale of Tempe by Madison Cawein and Lanterns in Gethsemane by Willard Wattles.

Four Seas Company—for the quotations from The Charnel Rose, The Jig of Forslin and The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken.

Hillacre Bookhouse—for the quotations from Arrows in the Gale by Arturo Giovannitti.

Harcourt, Brace & Company—for the selections from A Miscellany of American Poetry—1920; Canzoni and Carmina by T. A. Daly, Piping and Panning by Edwin Meade Robinson, Smoke and Steel by Carl Sandburg, Challenge and The New Adam by Louis Untermeyer, and The Roamer and Other Poems by George Edward Woodberry.

Harper & Brothers—for the selections from Fables for the Frivolous by Guy Wetmore Carryl and Dreams and Dust by Don Marquis.

Harr Wagner Publishing Co.—for the selections from The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller.

Henry Holt & Company—for the selections from Wilderness Songs by Grace Hazard Conkling, Portraits and Protests by Sarah N. Cleghorn, A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval by Robert Frost; Outcasts in Beulah Land by Roy Helton, Chicago Poems and Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg, These Times by Louis Untermeyer, and Factories by Margaret Widdemer.

The selections from The Complete Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Complete Works of Bret Harte, The Shoes That Danced by Anna Hempstead Branch, Davy and the Goblin by Charles E. Carryl, Grimm Tales Made Gay by Guy Wetmore Carryl, Riders of the Stars and Songs of the Trail by Harry Herbert Knibbs, Poems and Poetic Dramas by William Vaughn Moody, Lyrics of Joy by Frank Dempster Sherman, Poems by Edward Rowland Sill, Sea Garden by “H. D.,” and the quotations from Some Imagist Poets—1916 and Some Imagist Poets—1917 are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

B. W. Huebsch—for the selections from A Family Album by Alter Brody, The Vaunt of Man by William Ellery Leonard, The Ghetto and Sun-Up by Lola Ridge, Optimos by Horace Traubel, Growing Pains and Dreams out of Darkness by Jean Starr Untermeyer, and The Hesitant Heart by Winifred Welles.

Alfred A. Knopf—for the selections from A Canticle of Pan by Witter Bynner, Colors of Life by Max Eastman, Poems by T. S. Eliot, Asphalt and Other Poems by Orrick Johns, Mushrooms by Alfred Kreymborg, Songs for the New Age by James Oppenheim, Lustra by Ezra Pound, Profiles from China and Body and Raiment by Eunice Tietjens.

The Laurentian Publishers—for the poem from Motley Measures by Bert Leston Taylor.

The Liberator—for a poem by Jean Starr Untermeyer.

Little, Brown & Company—for the selections from Poems and Poems—Third Series by Emily Dickinson.

The Macmillan Company—for the selections from Poems by Gladys Cromwell, Youth Riding by Mary Carolyn Davies, The Congo and Other Poems and The Chinese Nightingale by Vachel Lindsay, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed and Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell, Spoon River Anthology and Songs and Satires by Edgar Lee Masters, The Quest by John G. Neihardt, The Man Against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Love Songs and Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale, Bluestone by Marguerite Wilkinson.

Robert M. McBride & Company—for the two poems taken from From the Hidden Way by James Branch Cabell.

The Manas Press—for the selections from Verse by Adelaide Crapsey.

Thomas B. Mosher—for the selections from A Quiet Road and A Wayside Lute by Lizette Woodworth Reese and The Flower from the Ashes by Edith M. Thomas.

The New Republic—for a poem by Ridgely Torrence.

Pagan Publishing Company—for two poems from Minna and Myself by Maxwell Bodenheim.

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse—for the two poems by Edwin Ford Piper and a sonnet by David Morton.

A. M. Robertson—for the sonnet from The House of Orchids by George Sterling.

Charles Scribner’s Sons—for the selections from Poems by Henry Cuyler Bunner, Poems by Eugene Field, The Bashful Earthquake by Oliver Herford, Poems of Sidney Lanier, The Children of the Night and The Town Down the River by Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Poems by Alan Seeger.

Frank Shay—for the quotation from Figs from Thistles by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Sherman, French & Company—for the two poems from The Human Fantasy and The Belovèd Adventure by John Hall Wheelock.

Small, Maynard & Company—for the selections from Ballads of Lost Haven by Bliss Carman, Along the Trail by Richard Hovey, Songs from Vagabondia and More Songs from Vagabondia by Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, and the poem by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman.

The Sonnet—for Frustrate by Leslie Nelson Jennings.

F. A. Stokes Company—for the selections from War Is Kind by Stephen Crane, Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner, and Poems by a Little Girl by Hilda Conkling.

Sturgis & Walton Company—for the poem from Monday Morning by James Oppenheim.

Vanity Fair—for “Wild Swans” and a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The Yale University Press—for selections from Young Adventure by Stephen Vincent Benét and The Burglar of the Zodiac by William Rose Benét.

The Yale Review—for “The Onset” by Robert Frost.

For several suggestions toward the preparation of this revised edition I am especially indebted to Professors Percy H. Boynton, John Livingston Lowes, Fred Lewis Pattee and Floyd Dell. This acknowledgment is a slight expression of my gratitude as well as a record of my obligation.

CONTENTS

PREFACE
The Civil War—and After

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

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

THE “POST-MORTEM” PERIOD

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

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

WALT WHITMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre of the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!

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

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

Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia.

Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts;

That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings;

Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus ...

For know that a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wider, untried domain awaits, demands you.

THE AWAKENING OF THE WEST

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

To the loose swagger of the West, two other men added their diverse contributions. Edward Rowland Sill, cut short just as his work was gaining headway and strength, brought to it a gentle radicalism, a calm and cultured honesty; Joaquin Miller, rushing to the other extreme, theatricalized and exaggerated all he touched. He shouted platitudes at the top of his voice; his lines boomed with the pomposity of a brass band; floods, fires, hurricanes, extravagantly blazing sunsets, Amazonian women, the thunder of a herd of buffaloes—all were unmercifully piled on. And yet, even in its most blatant fortissimos, Miller’s poetry occasionally captured the lavish grandeur of his surroundings, the splendor of the Sierras, the surge and spirit of the Western world.

Now that the leadership of letters had passed from the East, all parts of the country began to try their voices. The West continued to hold its tuneful supremacy; the tradition of Harte and Hay was followed (softened and sentimentalized) by Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley. In the South, Irwin Russell was pioneering in negro dialect (1875), Sidney Lanier fashioned his intricate harmonies (1879), and Madison Cawein was beginning to create his tropical and over-luxuriant lyrics. A few years later (in 1888) Russell brought out his faithfully-rendered Dialect Poems and the first phase of the American renascence had passed.

REACTION AND REVOLT IN THE ’90S

The reaction set in at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century. The passionate urge had spent itself, and in its place there remained nothing but that minor form of art which concerns itself less with creation than with re-creation. These re-creators wrote verse that was precise, scholarly and patently reproductive of their predecessors. “In 1890,” writes Percy H. Boynton, “the poetry-reading world was chiefly conscious of the passing of its leading singers for the last half-century. It was a period when they were recalling Emerson’s ‘Terminus’ and Longfellow’s ‘Ultima Thule,’ Whittier’s ‘A Lifetime,’ Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar,’ and Browning’s ‘Asolando.’” ... The poetry of this period (whether it is the hard chiseled verse of John B. Tabb or the ornate delicacy of Richard Watson Gilder) breathes a kind of moribund resignation; it is dead because it detached itself from the actual world, because it attempted to be a copied embellishment rather than an interpretation of life. But those who regarded poetry chiefly as a not too energetic indoor-exercise were not to rule unchallenged. Restlessness was in the air and revolt openly declared itself with the publication of Songs from Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia (1896) and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900). No one could have been more surprised at the tremendous popularity of these care-free celebrations (the first of the three collections went through seven rapid editions) than the young authors, Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. For theirs was a revolt without a program, a headlong flight to escape—what? In the very first poem, Hovey voices their manifesto:

Off with the fetters

That chafe and restrain!

Off with the chain!

Here Art and Letters,

Music and Wine

And Myrtle and Wanda,

The winsome witches,

Blithely combine.

Here is Golconda,

Here are the Indies,

Here we are free—

Free as the wind is,

Free as the sea,

Free!

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

I tell you that we,

While you are smirking

And lying and shirking

Life’s duty of duties,

Honest sincerity,

We are in verity

Free!

Free to rejoice

In blisses and beauties!

Free as the voice

Of the wind as it passes!

Free ... etc.

Free, one concludes, to dwell with Music and Wine, Myrtle and Wanda, Art and Letters. Free, in short, to follow, with a more athletic energy, the same ideals as the parlor-poets they gibed so relentlessly. And the new insurgence triumphed. It was the heartiness, the gypsy jollity, the rush of high spirits that conquered. Readers of the Vagabondia books were swept along by their speed faster than by their philosophy.

The enthusiastic acceptance of these new apostles of outdoor vigor was, however, not as much of an accident as it seemed. On one side, the world of art, the public was wearied by barren philosophizing set to tinkling music; on the other, the world of action, it was faced by a staggering growth of materialism which it feared. Hovey, Carman and their imitators offered a swift and stirring way out. But it was neither an effectual nor a permanent escape. The war with Spain, the industrial turmoil, the growth of social consciousness and new ideas of responsibility made America look for fresh valuations, more searching songs. Hovey began to go deeper into himself and his age; in the mid-West, William Vaughn Moody grappled with the problems of his times only to have his work cut short by death in 1910. But these two were exceptions; in the main, it was another interval—two decades of appraisal and expectancy, of pause and preparation.

INTERIM—1890–1912

This interval of about twenty years was notable for its effort to treat the spirit of the times with a cheerful evasiveness, a humorous unconcern; its most representative craftsmen were, with four exceptions, the writers of light verse. These four exceptions were Richard Hovey, Bliss Carman, William Vaughn Moody and Edwin Markham. Both Hovey (in his Along the Trail and his modernization of Launcelot and Guenevere, a poetic drama in five books) and Carman (in his later poems like Songs of the Sea Children) saw wider horizons and tuned their instruments to a larger music.

Moody’s power was still greater. In “An Ode in Time of Hesitation,” he protested against turning the “new-world victories into gain” and painted America on a majestic canvas. In “The Quarry” he celebrated America’s part in preventing the breaking-up of China by the greedy empires of Europe (an act accomplished by John Hay, poet and diplomat). In “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,” a dirge wrenched from the depths of his nature, Moody cried out against our own grasping imperialists. It was the fulfilment of this earlier poem which found its fierce climax in the lengthy Ode, with lines like:

Was it for this our fathers kept the law?

This crown shall crown their struggle and their ruth?

Are we the eagle nation Milton saw

Mewing its mighty youth?...

... O ye who lead

Take heed!

Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite.

Early in 1899, the name of Edwin Markham flashed across the land when, out of San Francisco, rose the sonorous challenge of “The Man with the Hoe.” This poem, which has been ecstatically called “the battle-cry of the next thousand years” (Joaquin Miller declared it contained “the whole Yosemite—the thunder, the might, the majesty”), caught up, with a prophetic vibrancy, the passion for social justice that was waiting to be intensified in poetry. Markham summed up and spiritualized the unrest that was in the air; in the figure of one man with a hoe, he drew a picture of men in the mines, men in the sweat-shop, men working without joy, without hope. To social consciousness he added social conscience. In a ringing blank verse, Markham crystallized the expression of outrage, the heated ferment of the period. His was a vision of a new order, austere in beauty but deriving its life-blood from the millions struggling in the depths.

Inspiring as these examples were, they did not generate others of their kind; the field lay fallow for more than a decade. The lull was pronounced, the gathering storm remained inaudible.

RENASCENCE—1913

Suddenly the “new” poetry burst upon us with unexpected vigor and extraordinary variety. Moody and Markham were its immediate forerunners; Whitman its godfather. October, 1912, saw the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a monthly that was to introduce the work of hitherto unknown poets and to herald, with an eager impartiality, the various groups, schools and “movements.” The magazine came at the very moment before the breaking of the storm. Flashes and rumblings had already been troubling the literary heavens; a few months later—the deluge! For three years the skies continued to discharge such strange and divergent phenomena as Vachel Lindsay’s General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1913), James Oppenheim’s Songs for the New Age (1914), the first anthology of The Imagists (1914), Challenge (1914), Amy Lowell’s Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Lindsay’s The Congo and Other Poems (1914), Robert Frost’s North of Boston (1914), Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), John Gould Fletcher’s Irradiations (1915), Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916). By 1917, the “new” poetry was ranked as “America’s first national art”; its success was sweeping, its sales unprecedented. People who never before had read verse, turned to it and found they could not only read but relish it. They discovered that for the enjoyment of poetry it was not necessary to have at their elbows a dictionary of rare words and classical references; they no longer were required to be acquainted with Latin legendry and the minor love-affairs of the major Greek divinities. Life was their glossary, not literature. The new product spoke to them in their own language. And it did more: it spoke to them of what they had scarcely ever heard expressed; it was not only closer to their soil but nearer their souls.

ROBINSON AND MASTERS

One reason why the new poetry achieved so sudden a success was its freedom from the traditionally stilted “poetic diction.” Revolting strongly against the assumption that poetry must have a vocabulary of its own, the poets of the new era spoke in the oldest and most stirring tongue; they used a language that was the language not of the poetasters but of the people. In the tones of ordinary speech they rediscovered the strength, the dignity, the divine core of the commonplace.

E. A. Robinson had already been employing the sharp epithet, the direct and clarifying utterance which was to become part of our present technique. As early as 1897, in The Children of the Night, Robinson anticipated the brief characterizations and the etched outlines of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology; he stressed the psychological element with unerring artistry and sureness of touch. His sympathetic studies of men whose lives were, from a worldly standpoint, failures were a sharp reaction to the current high valuation on financial achievements, ruthless efficiency and success at any cost. Ahead of his period, he had to wait until 1916, when a public prepared for him by the awakened interest in native poetry discovered The Man Against the Sky (1916) and the richness of Robinson at the same time.

Frost and Masters were the bright particular planets of 1915, although the star of the latter has waned while the light of the former has grown in magnitude. Yet Masters’s most famous book will rank as one of the landmarks of American literature. In it, he has synthesized the small towns of the mid-West with a background that is unmistakably local and implications that are universal. This amazing volume, in its curiosity and comprehensiveness, is a broad cross-section of whole communities. Beneath its surface tales and dramas, its condensation of grocery store gossip, Spoon River Anthology is a great part of America in microcosm. The success of the volume was sensational. It was actually one of the season’s “best sellers”; in a few months, it went into edition after edition. People forgot Masters’s revelation of the sordid cheats and hypocrisies, his arraignment of dirty politics and dirtier chicanery, in their interest at seeing their neighbors so pitilessly exposed. Yet had Masters dwelt only on the drab disillusion of the village, had he (as he was constantly in danger of doing) overemphasized the morbid and sensual episodes, he would have left only a spectacular and poorly-balanced work. But the book ascends to buoyant exaltation and ends on a plane of victorious idealism. In its wide gamut, Spoon River, rising from its narrow origins, reaches epical proportions. Indigenous to its roots, it is stark, unflinching, unforgettable.

FROST AND SANDBURG

The same year that brought forth Spoon River Anthology saw the American edition of Frost’s North of Boston. It was evident at once that the true poet of New England had arrived. Unlike his predecessors, Frost was never a poetic provincial—never parochial in the sense that America was still a literary parish of England. He is as native as the lonely farmhouses, the dusty blueberries, the isolated people, the dried-up brooks and mountain intervals that he describes. Loving, above everything else, the beauty of the Fact, he shares, with Robinson and Masters, the determination to tell not merely the actual but the factual truth. But Frost, a less disillusioned though a more saddened poet, wears his rue and his realism with a difference. Where Robinson is downright and definite, Frost diverges, going roundabout and, in his speculative wandering, covering a wider territory of thought. Where Masters is violent and hotly scornful, Frost is reticent and quietly sympathetic. Again where Masters, viewing the mêlée above the struggle, writes about his characters, Frost is of the people. Where Robinson, in his more racy and reminiscent moods, often reflects New England, Frost is New England.

North of Boston is well described by the poet’s own subtitle: “a book of people.” In it one not only sees a countryside of people making the intricate pattern of their lives, one catches them thinking out loud, one can hear the very tones of their voices. Here we have speech so arranged and translated that the speaker is heard on the printed page; any reader will be led by the kind and color of these words into reproducing the changing accents in which they are supposed to be uttered. It is this insistence that “all poetry is the reproduction of the tones of actual speech” that gives these poems, as well as the later ones, a quickly-communicated emotional appeal. It endows them with the deepest power of which words are capable—the power to transmit significant sounds. These sounds, let in from the vernacular, are full of a robust, creative energy; they share the blood and bones of the people they represent.

But Frost is by no means the dark naturalist that many suspect. Behind the mask of “grimness” which many of his critics have fastened upon him, there is a continual elfin pucker; a whimsical smile, a half-disclosed raillery glints beneath his most somber monologues. His most concrete facts are symbols of spiritual values; through his very reticence one hears more than the voice of New England.

Just so, the great mid-West, that vast region of steel mills and slaughter-houses, of cornfields and prairies, of crowded cities and empty skies, speaks through Carl Sandburg. In Sandburg, industrial America has found its voice: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920) vibrate with the immense purring of dynamos, the swishing rhythms of threshing arms, the gossip and laughter of construction gangs, the gigantic and tireless energy of the modern machine. Frankly indebted to Whitman, Sandburg’s poems are less sweeping but more varied; musically his lines mark a great advance. He sounds the extremes of the gamut: there are few poems in our language more violent than “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter,” few lyrics as hushed and tender as “Cool Tombs.”

Like Frost, Sandburg is true to things. But Frost is content with the inexhaustible Fact and its spiritual implications; he never hopes to drain it all. Sandburg also feeds on the fact, but it does not satisfy him. He has strange hungers; he hunts eagerly for the question behind, the answer beyond. The actual scene, to him, is a point of vivid and abrupt departure. Reality, far from being the earth on which he dwells, is, for Sandburg, the ground he touches before rising; realism acts merely as a springboard from which this poet leaps into a romantic mysticism.

When Chicago Poems first appeared, it was received with a disfavor ranging from hesitant patronization to the scornful jeers of the academicians. Sandburg was accused of verbal anarchy; of a failure to distinguish prose matter from poetic material; of uncouthness, vulgarity, of assaults on the English language and a score of other crimes. In the face of those who still see only a coarseness and distorted veritism in Sandburg, it cannot be said too often that he is brutal only when dealing with brutal things; that his “vulgarity” springs from an immense love of life, not from a merely decorative part of it; that his bitterest invectives are the result of a healthy disgust of shams; that, behind the force of his projectile-phrases, there burns the greater flame of his pity; that the strength of his hatred is exceeded only by the challenge of his love.

THE IMAGISTS

Sandburg established himself as the most daring user of American words—rude words ranging from the racy metaphors of the soil to the slang of the street. But even before this, the possibilities of a new vocabulary were being tested. As early as 1865, Whitman was saying, “We must have new words, new potentialities of speech—an American range of self-expression ... The new times, the new people need a tongue according, yes, and what is more, they will have such a tongue—will not be satisfied until it is evolved.”

It is curious to think that one of the most effective agents to fulfil Whitman’s prophecy and free modern poetry from its mouldering diction was that little band of preoccupied specialists, the Imagists. They were, for all their preciosity and occasional extravagances, prophets of freedom—liberators in the sense that their programs, pronouncements and propaganda compelled even their most dogged adversaries to acknowledge the integrity of their aims. Their restatement of old truths was one of the things which helped the new poetry out of a bog of rhetorical rubbish.

Ezra Pound was the first to gather the insurgents into a definite group. During the winter of 1913, he collected a number of poems illustrating the Imagist point of view and had them printed in a volume: Des Imagistes (1914). A little later Pound withdrew from the clan. The rather queerly assorted group began to disintegrate and Amy Lowell, then in England, brought the best of the younger members together in three yearly anthologies (Some Imagist Poets) which appeared in 1915, 1916 and 1917. There were, in Miss Lowell’s new grouping, three Englishmen (D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint), three Americans (“H. D.,” John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell), and their creed, summed up in six articles of faith, was as follows:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the merely decorative word.

2. To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods. We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry ... We do believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms.

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

4. To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very essence of poetry.

It does not seem possible that these six obvious and almost platitudinous principles, which the Imagists so often neglected in their poetry, could have evoked the storm of argument, fury and downright vilification that broke as soon as the militant Amy Lowell began to champion them. Far from being revolutionary, these principles were not new; they were not even thought so by their sponsors. The Imagists themselves realized they were merely restating ideals which had fallen into desuetude, and declared, “They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature.” And yet many conservative critics, joined by the one hundred per cent reactionaries, rushed wildly to combat these “heresies”! They forgot that, in trying to protect the future from such lawlessness as “using the exact word,” from allowing “freedom in the choice of subject,” from the importance of “concentration,” they were actually attacking the highest traditions of their enshrined past.

The controversy succeeded in doing even more than the work of the Imagists themselves. “H. D.” remained in England, perfecting her delicate and exquisitely finished designs. John Gould Fletcher, a more vacillating expatriate, continued to strengthen his gift and shift his standards; his later and richer work is in almost flat opposition to the early pronouncements. Miss Lowell was left to carry on the battle single-handed; to defend the theories which, in practice, she was beginning to violate brilliantly. By all odds, the most energetic and unflagging experimenter, Miss Lowell’s versatility became amazing. She has wielded a controversial cudgel with one hand and, with the other, she has written Chaucerian stanzas, polyphonic prose, monologs in her native New England dialect, irregular vers libre, conservative couplets, translations from the French, echoes from the Japanese, even primitive re-creations of Indian folk-lore!

The work of the Imagists was done. Its members began to develop themselves by themselves. They had helped to swell the tide of realistic and romantic naturalism—a tide of which their contribution was merely one wave, a high breaker that carried its impact far inshore.

THE NEW FOLK-POETRY

In a country that has not been mellowed by antiquity, that has not possessed songs for its peasantry or traditions for its singers, one cannot look for a wealth of folk-stuff. In such a country—the United States, to be specific—what folk-poetry there is, has followed the path of the pioneer. At first these homely songs were merely adaptations and localized versions of English ballads and border minstrelsy, of which the “Lonesome Tunes” discovered in the Kentucky mountains by Howard Brockway and Loraine Wyman are excellent examples. But later, a more definitely native spirit found expression in the various sections of these states. In the West (during the seventies) Bret Harte and John Hay celebrated, in their own accents, the rough, big-hearted miners, ranchers, steamboat pilots, the supposed descendants of the emigrants from Pike County, Missouri. In the Middle West the desire for local color and music led to the popularity of James Whitcomb Riley’s Hoosier ballads and the spirited jingles of Eugene Field. In the South the inspiration of the negro spirituals and ante-bellum songs was utilized to excellent effect by Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris and, later, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Indian, a more genuine primitive, has been as difficult to transplant poetically as he has been to assimilate ethnically. But, in spite of the racial differences in sentiment, religion and philosophy, brave attempts to bring the spirit of the Indian originals into our poetry have been made by Mary Austin, Constance Lindsay Skinner, Natalie Curtis Burlin, Lew Sarett and Alice Corbin Henderson.

In the West today there is a revival of interest in backwoods melodies and folk-created verse. John A. Lomax has published two volumes of cowboy songs—most of them anonymous—full of tang, wild fancy and robust humor. The tradition of Harte and Hay is being carried on by such racy interpreters as Harry Herbert Knibbs, Badger Clark and Edwin Ford Piper. But, of all contemporaries who approximate the spirit of folk-poetry, none has made more striking or more indubitably American contributions than Vachel Lindsay of Springfield, Illinois.

LINDSAY, OPPENHEIM AND OTHERS

Lindsay is essentially a people’s poet. He does not hesitate to express himself in terms of the lowest common denominator; his fingers are alternately on his pen and the public pulse. Living near enough the South to appreciate the negro and yet not too near to despise him, Lindsay has been tremendously influenced by the colorful suggestions, the fantastic superstitions, the revivalistic gusto, the half-savage Christianity and, above all, by the curiously syncopated music that characterize the black man in America. In “The Congo,” “John Brown” and the less extended but equally remarkable “Simon Legree,” the words roll with the solemnity of an exhortation, dance with a grotesque fervor or snap, crackle, wink and leap with all the humorous rhythms of a piece of “ragtime.” Lindsay catches the burly color and boisterous music of camp-meetings, minstrel shows, revival jubilees.

And Lindsay does more. He carries his democratic determinations further than any of his confrères. His dream is of a great communal Art; he preaches the gospel that all villages should be centers of beauty, all its citizens, artists. At heart a missionary even more than a minstrel, Lindsay often loses himself in his own evangelism; worse, he frequently cheapens himself and caricatures his own gift by pandering to the vaudeville instinct that insists on putting a noisy “punch” into everything, regardless of taste, artistry or a sense of proportion. He is most impressive when he is least frenetic, when he is purely fantastic (as in “The Chinese Nightingale” or the series of metaphorical poems about the moon) or when a greater theme and a finer restraint unite (as in “The Eagle That Is Forgotten”) to create a preaching that does not cease to be poetry.

Something of the same blend of prophet and poet is found in the work of James Oppenheim. Oppenheim is a throwback to the ancient Hebrew singers; the music of the Psalms rolls through his lines, the fire of Isaiah kindles his spirit. This poetry, with its obvious reminders of Whitman, is biblical in its inflection, Oriental in its heat; it runs through forgotten centuries and brings buried Asia to busy America. It carries to the Western world the color of the East, adding the gift of prophecy to pragmatic purpose. In books like War and Laughter and Songs for the New Age the race of god-breakers and god-makers speaks with a new voice; here, with analytic intensity, the old iconoclasm and still older worship are again united.

The new poets have won their way by their differences as well as by their chance similarities. They belong to no one school, represent no single tendency and, differing widely from their present-day English fellow-craftsmen, are far less hampered by the burdens of traditions or the necessity of casting them off. They are more nearly free. One sees this even in the work of the more deliberately conventional singers. Lyricists like Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay write in a clean, straightforward idiom, an intense naturalness that is a frank commentary on the tinkling and over-sentimental verse that used to pass for genuine emotion. Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson continue to use the strictest rhymes and most rigid meters and yet their lines are as “modern,” as searching as the freest free verse. Form per se matters scarcely at all; all forms are employed. Conrad Aiken achieves a flexible combination of rhyme and assonance. Sandburg, “H. D.,” Kreymborg and John Gould Fletcher dispense, for the most part, with rhyme, without sacrificing the beauty of sound or stress. Masters and Amy Lowell use the old forms and the new ones with impartiality and equal skill. A sweeping inclusiveness distinguishes our contemporary verse; it embraces all themes, all cultures, all modes of expression. America has become a melting-pot in a poetic as well as an ethnic sense. The rich variety of its structure and subject-matter is in striking opposition to the thin, specialized product of the transition poets. New England is no longer the single literary center. As the country has matured, the poets have grown with it, singing everywhere and, much to Art’s confusion, in every key. It is as if submerged springs had burst through stubborn ground; instead of one placid stream, there are a dozen rushing currents.

SUMMARY—THE NEW SPIRIT

It is difficult to draw a line between periods, especially when one is called upon to define “modernity.” But in the case of the development of American poetry, the task is made easier by Whitman. Whitman ended and began an epoch. This collection therefore begins where he left off; it might well be called, “American Poetry Since Whitman.”

It would have been pleasant to divide the poetry itself into groups and distinct tendencies. Unfortunately such a scheme is impossible. In the first place, one can scarcely get a proper perspective on contemporary writers (on whom the chief emphasis has been placed), especially since many of them are still developing. Secondly, one cannot give the picture of a period in the state of flux except by showing its fluid character. The prime object of this collection is to reflect this very flux and diversity—particularly illustrated by those poets who, because of their strong individualism, would not fit in any one grouping. Since the chronological arrangement is, therefore, the most logical one, an arbitrary boundary has been fixed. The year 1830 becomes the dividing-line; any poet born earlier than that date is ruthlessly excluded. This, fortunately, eliminates scarcely any poet of value; for between Whitman (born 1819) and Emily Dickinson (that early imagist), there were no singers more memorable than the Cary sisters, Bayard Taylor and the painfully precise Richard Henry Stoddard.

It is a happy circumstance that this volume should begin with Emily Dickinson, whose work, posthumously printed, was unknown as late as 1890 and scarcely noticed until several years later. For here is a forerunner of the new spirit—free in expression, unhampered in choice of subject, penetrative in psychology—to which a countryful of writers has responded. No longer confined to one or two literary centers, the impulse to create is everywhere. There is scarcely a state, barely a township, that has not produced its laureate.

Most of the poets represented in these pages have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened to include things unknown to the poet of yesterday. They have learned to distinguish real beauty from mere prettiness; to wring loveliness out of squalor; to find wonder in neglected places; to search for hidden truths even in the dark caves of the unconscious.

And with the use of the material of everyday life, there has come a further simplification: the use of the language of everyday speech. The stilted and mouth-filling phrases have been practically discarded in favor of words that are part of our daily vocabulary. It would be hard at present to find a representative poet employing such awkward and outworn contractions as ’twixt, ’mongst, ope’; such evidences of poor padding as adown, did go, doth smile; such dull rubber-stamps (clichés is the French term) as heavenly blue, roseate glow, golden hope, girlish grace, gentle breeze, etc. The peradventures, forsooths and mayhaps have disappeared.... And, as the speech of the modern poet has grown less elaborate, so have the patterns that embody it. Not necessarily discarding rhyme, regular rhythm or any of the musical assets of the older poets, the forms have grown simpler; the intricate versification has given way to lines that reflect and suggest the tones of animated and even exalted speech. The result of this has been a great gain both in sincerity and intensity; it has enabled the poet of today to put greater emphasis on his emotion rather than on the shell that covers it—he can dwell with richer detail on the matter instead of the manner.

One could go into minute particulars concerning the growth of an American spirit in our literature and point out how many of the latter-day poets have responded to native forces larger than their backgrounds. Such a course would be endless and unprofitable. It is pertinent, however, to observe that, young as this nation is, it is already being supplied with the stuff of legends, ballads and even epics. The modern singer has turned to celebrate his own folk-tales. It is particularly interesting to observe how the figure of Lincoln has been treated by the best of our living poets. I have accordingly included seven poems by seven writers, each differing in manner, technique and point of view.

For the rest, I leave the casual reader, as well as the student, to discover the awakened vigor and energy in this, one of the few great poetic periods in native literature. With the realization that this brief gathering is not so much a summary as an introduction, it is hoped that, in spite of its limitations, this collection will draw the reader on to a closer consideration of the poets here included—even to those omitted. The purpose of such an anthology must always be to stimulate an interest rather than to satisfy a curiosity. Such, at least, is the hope and aim of one editor.

L. U.

January, 1921.

New York City.

MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

“She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends,” writes Higginson, “and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems.” Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the peculiar Blake-like quality of her thought won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed by Poems—Second Series (1892) and Poems—Third Series (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single Hound (1914)—almost all of the new poems (to which Mrs. Bianchi wrote a preface of great personal value) being a record of Emily Dickinson’s romantic friendship for her sister.

The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her time. “An epigrammatic Walt Whitman,” some one has called her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily Dickinson’s work was strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the intrusion of merely trivial conceits or forced “thought-rhymes.” But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, sparkling in their brilliancy, cameo-like in their delicate contours, opalescent in their buried fires.

Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst, May 15, 1886.

CHARTLESS

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet now I know how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,

Nor visited in Heaven;

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the chart were given.

INDIAN SUMMER

These are the days when birds come back,

A very few, a bird or two,

To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on

The old, old sophistries of June,—

A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee,

Almost thy plausibility

Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,

And softly through the altered air

Hurries a timid leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,

Oh, last communion in the haze,

Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,

Thy consecrated bread to break,

Taste thine immortal wine!

SUSPENSE

Elysium is as far as to

The very nearest room,

If in that room a friend await

Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming foot,

The opening of a door.

THE RAILWAY TRAIN

I like to see it lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,

And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop—docile and omnipotent—

At its own stable door.

A CEMETERY

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,

And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,

And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer’s nimble mansion,

Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these.

BECLOUDED

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,

A travelling flake of snow

Across a barn or through a rut

Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day

How some one treated him;

Nature, like us, is sometimes caught

Without her diadem.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). After a brief clerkship, he became junior literary critic of The Evening Mirror at nineteen, publishing his first book (The Bells), an immature collection of echoes, at the same time. From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. But though Aldrich mingled with the New York group, he was not part of it; he longed for the more rarefied intellectual atmosphere of New England and when, in 1866, Osgood offered him the editorship of Every Saturday, published in Boston, Aldrich accepted with alacrity. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890.

Aldrich’s work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances; the reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. There is no real air in these verses; it is Nature as conceived by a poet reading the Arabian Nights in a hot-house. In company with Stoddard and Taylor, he dwelt in a literary Orientalism—(Stoddard’s Book of the East followed fast upon Taylor’s Poems of the Orient)—and Aldrich’s Cloth of Gold was suffused with similar “vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles” (to quote Holmes), laboring hard to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome profusion of lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses, diaphanous gauzes, etc.

The second phase of Aldrich’s art is more human in appeal as it is surer in artistry. He learned to sharpen his images, to fashion his smallest lyrics with a remarkable finesse. “In the little steel engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent,” writes Percy H. Boynton, “there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid.” Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, these poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are some of the epigrams, the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, passionless in tone but exquisite in design.

The best of Aldrich’s diffuse poetry has been collected in an inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. He died in 1907.

MEMORY

My mind lets go a thousand things,

Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,

And yet recalls the very hour—

’Twas noon by yonder village tower,

And on the last blue noon in May—

The wind came briskly up this way,

Crisping the brook beside the road;

Then, pausing here, set down its load

Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly

Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

“ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME”

Enamored architect of airy rhyme,

Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says.

Good souls, but innocent of dreamers’ ways,

Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time;

Others, beholding how thy turrets climb

’Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days;

But most beware of those who come to praise.

O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime

And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all;

Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame,

Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given;

Then, if at last the airy structure fall,

Dissolve, and vanish—take thyself no shame.

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

TWO QUATRAINS

MAPLE LEAVES

October turned my maple’s leaves to gold;

The most are gone now; here and there one lingers:

Soon these will slip from out the twigs’ weak hold,

Like coins between a dying miser’s fingers.

PESSIMIST AND OPTIMIST

This one sits shivering in Fortune’s smile,

Taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath.

This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while

Laughs in the teeth of Death.

John Hay

John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated from Brown University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois bar a few years later. At nineteen, when he went back to Warsaw, the little Mississippi town where he had lived as a boy, he dreamed only of being a poet—a poet, it must be added, of the pleasantly conventional, transition type. But the Civil War was to disturb his mild fantasies. He became private secretary to Lincoln, then major and assistant adjutant-general under General Gilmore, then secretary of the Legation at Paris, chargé d’affaires at Vienna and secretary of legation at Madrid.

His few vivid Pike County Ballads came more as a happy accident than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay returned from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian Days, he still had visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. But he found everyone reading Bret Harte’s short stories and the new expression of the rude West. (See Preface.) He speculated upon the possibility of doing something similar, translating the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads in a vein utterly different from everything Hay wrote before or after. The poet-politician seems to have regarded this series somewhat in the nature of light, extempore verse, belonging to a far lower plane than his serious publications; he talked about them reluctantly, he even hoped that they would be forgotten. It is difficult to say whether this regret grew because Hay, loving the refinements of culture, at heart hated any suggestion of vulgarity, or because of a basic lack of courage—Hay having published his novel of labor unrest in the early 80’s (The Breadwinners) anonymously.

The fact remains, his rhymes of Pike County have survived all his more classical lines. They served for a time as a fresh influence, they remain a creative accomplishment.

Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has ever had. He died in 1905.

JIM BLUDSO,
OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE

Wall, no! I can’t tell whar he lives,

Becase he don’t live, you see;

Leastways, he’s got out of the habit

Of livin’ like you and me.

Whar have you been for the last three year

That you haven’t heard folks tell

How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks

The night of the Prairie Belle?

He war’n’t no saint,—them engineers

Is all pretty much alike,—

One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill

And another one here, in Pike;

A keerless man in his talk was Jim,

And an awkward hand in a row,

But he never flunked, and he never lied,—

I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had:

To treat his engine well;

Never be passed on the river;

To mind the pilot’s bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,

A thousand times he swore,

He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,

And her day come at last,—

The Movastar was a better boat,

But the Belle she wouldn’t be passed.

And so she came tearin’ along that night—

The oldest craft on the line—

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,

And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clar’d the bar,

And burnt a hole in the night,

And quick as a flash she turned and made

For that wilier-bank on the right.

Thar was runnin’ and cussin’, but Jim yelled out,

Over all the infernal roar,

“I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last galoot’s ashore.”

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin’ boat

Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,

And they all had trust in his cussedness,

And knowed he would keep his word.

And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off

Afore the smokestacks fell,—

And Bludso’s ghost went up alone

In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He warn’t no saint,—but at jedgement

I’d run my chance with Jim,

’Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn’t shook hands with him.

He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—

And went for it thar and then;

And Christ ain’t a goin’ to be too hard

On a man that died for men.

BANTY TIM

(Remarks of Sergeant Tilmon Joy to the White Man’s Committee of Spunky Point, Illinois)

I reckon I git your drift, gents,—

You ’low the boy sha’n’t stay;

This is a white man’s country;

You’re Dimocrats, you say;

And whereas, and seein’, and wherefore,

The times bein’ all out o’ j’int,

The nigger has got to mosey

From the limits o’ Spunky P’int!

Le’s reason the thing a minute:

I’m an old-fashioned Dimocrat too,

Though I laid my politics out o’ the way

For to keep till the war was through.

But I come back here, allowin’

To vote as I used to do,

Though it gravels me like the devil to train

Along o’ sich fools as you.

Now dog my cats ef I kin see,

In all the light of the day,

What you’ve got to do with the question

Ef Tim shill go or stay.

And furder than that I give notice,

Ef one of you tetches the boy,

He kin check his trunks to a warmer clime

Than he’ll find in Illanoy.

Why, blame your hearts, jest hear me!

You know that ungodly day

When our left struck Vicksburg Heights, how ripped

And torn and tattered we lay.

When the rest retreated I stayed behind,

Fur reasons sufficient to me,—

With a rib caved in, and a leg on a strike,

I sprawled on that damned glacee.

Lord! how the hot sun went for us,

And br’iled and blistered and burned!

How the Rebel bullets whizzed round us

When a cuss in his death-grip turned!

Till along toward dusk I seen a thing

I couldn’t believe for a spell:

That nigger—that Tim—was a crawlin’ to me

Through that fire-proof, gilt-edged hell!

The Rebels seen him as quick as me,

And the bullets buzzed like bees;

But he jumped for me, and shouldered me,

Though a shot brought him once to his knees;

But he staggered up, and packed me off,

With a dozen stumbles and falls,

Till safe in our lines he drapped us both,

His black hide riddled with balls.

So, my gentle gazelles, thar’s my answer,

And here stays Banty Tim:

He trumped Death’s ace for me that day,

And I’m not goin’ back on him!

You may rezoloot till the cows come home,

But ef one of you tetches the boy,

He’ll wrastle his hash to-night in hell,

Or my name’s not Tilmon Joy!

Bret Harte

(Francis) Bret Harte was born August 25, 1839, at Albany, New York. His childhood was spent in various cities of the East. Late in 1853 his widowed mother went to California with a party of relatives, and two months later, when he was fifteen, Bret Harte and his sister followed. He dreamed even at this age of being a poet. During the next few years he was engaged in school-teaching, typesetting, politics, mining and journalism, becoming editor of The Overland Monthly at San Francisco in 1868.

Harte’s fame came suddenly. Late in the sixties he had written a burlesque in rhyme of two Western gamblers trying to fleece a guileless Chinaman who claimed to know nothing about cards but who, it turned out, was scarcely as innocent as he appeared. Harte, in the midst of writing serious poetry, had put the verses aside as too crude and trifling for publication. Some time later, just as The Overland Monthly was going to press, it was discovered that the form was one page short. Having nothing else on hand, Harte had these rhymes set up. Instead of passing unnoticed, the poem was quoted everywhere; it swept the West and captivated the East. When The Luck of Roaring Camp followed, Harte became not only a national but an international figure. England acclaimed him and The Atlantic Monthly paid him $10,000 to write for a year in his Pike County vein.

East and West Poems appeared in 1871; in 1872 he published an enlarged Poetical Works including many earlier pieces. His scores of short stories represent Harte at his best; “M’liss,” “Tennessee’s Partner,” “The Outcast of Poker Flat”—these are the work of a lesser, transplanted Dickens. His novels are of minor importance; they are carelessly constructed, theatrically conceived; his characters are little more than badly-wired marionettes that betray every movement made by their manipulator.

In 1872 Harte, encouraged by his success, returned to his native East; in 1878 he went to Germany as consul. Two years later he was transferred to Scotland and, after five years there, went to London, where he remained the rest of his life. Harte’s later period remains mysteriously shrouded. He never came back to America, not even for a visit; he ceased to correspond with his family; he separated himself from all the most intimate associations of his early life. He died, suddenly, at Camberley, England, May 6, 1902.

“JIM”

Say there! P’r’aps

Some on you chaps

Might know Jim Wild?

Well,—no offense:

Thar ain’t no sense

In gittin’ riled!

Jim was my chum

Up on the Bar:

That’s why I come

Down from up yar,

Lookin’ for Jim.

Thank ye, sir! You

Ain’t of that crew,—

Blest if you are!

Money? Not much:

That ain’t my kind;

I ain’t no such.

Rum? I don’t mind,

Seein’ it’s you.

Well, this yer Jim,—

Did you know him?

Jes’ ’bout your size;

Same kind of eyes;—

Well, that is strange:

Why, it’s two year

Since he came here,

Sick, for a change.

Well, here’s to us:

Eh?

The h—— you say!

Dead?

That little cuss?

What makes you star’,

You over thar?

Can’t a man drop

’s glass in yer shop

But you must r’ar?

It wouldn’t take

D——d much to break

You and your bar.

Dead!

Poor—little—Jim!

Why, thar was me,

Jones, and Bob Lee,

Harry and Ben,—

No-account men:

Then to take him!

Well, thar—Good-by.

No more, sir—I—

Eh?

What’s that you say?

Why, dern it!—sho!—

No? Yes! By Joe!

Sold!

Sold! Why, you limb,

You ornery,

Derned, old,

Long-legged Jim.

PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES

(Table Mountain, 1870)

Which I wish to remark,

And my language is plain,

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny,

In regard to the same,

What that name might imply;

But his smile it was pensive and childlike,

As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third,

And quite soft was the skies;

Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William

And me in a way I despise.

Which we had a small game,

And Ah Sin took a hand:

It was Euchre. The same

He did not understand;

But he smiled as he sat by the table,

With a smile that was childlike and bland.

Yet the cards they were stocked

In a way that I grieve,

And my feelings were shocked

At the state of Nye’s sleeve,

Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers,

And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played

By that heathen Chinee,

And the points that he made,

Were quite frightful to see,—

Till at last he put down a right bower,

Which the same Nye had dealt unto me!

Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with a sigh,

And said, “Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,”—

And he went for that heathen Chinee.

In the scene that ensued

I did not take a hand,

But the floor it was strewed

Like the leaves on the strand

With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding,

In the game “he did not understand.”

In his sleeves, which were long,

He had twenty-four packs,—

Which was coming it strong,

Yet I state but the facts;

And we found on his nails, which were taper,

What is frequent in tapers,—that’s wax.

Which is why I remark,

And my language is plain,

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,—

Which the same I am free to maintain.

Joaquin Miller

Cincinnatus (Heine) Miller, or, to give him the name he adopted, Joaquin Miller, was born in 1841 of immigrant parents. As he himself writes, “My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio.” When Miller was twelve, his family left the mid-West with “two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride.” The distance covered in their cross-country exodus (they took a roundabout route to Oregon) was nearly three thousand miles. The time consumed, he records, “was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort.... Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smouldering camp-fires of the day before.” This journey made a lasting impression on the boy’s impressionable mind; it was this tortuous wandering that gave Miller his reverence for the spaciousness and glory of the West in general and the pioneer in particular. After two years in the Oregon home, he ran away to find gold.

At fifteen we find Miller living with the Indians as one of them; in 1859 (at the age of eighteen) he attends a missionschool “college” in Eugene, Oregon; between 1860 and 1865 he is express-messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer and, occasionally, a poet. He holds a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870.

His first book (Specimens) appears in 1868, his second (Joaquin et al., from which he took his name) in 1869. No response—not even from “the bards of San Francisco Bay” to whom he had dedicated the latter volume. He is chagrined, discouraged, angry. He resolves to quit America, to go to the land that has always been the nursing-ground of poets. “Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers.” He arrives in London, unheralded, unknown. He takes his manuscripts to one publisher after another with the same negative result. Finally, with a pioneer desperation, he prints privately one hundred copies of his Pacific Poems, sending them out for review. Sensation! The reversal of Miller’s fortunes is one of the most startling in all literature. He becomes famous overnight. He is fêted, lauded, lionized; he is ranked as an equal of Browning, given a dinner by the Pre-Raphaelites, acclaimed as “the great interpreter of America,” “the Bryon of Oregon”!

His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his crashing effects, the louder he roared, the better the English public liked it. When he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and flowing hair, childhood visions of the “wild and woolly Westerner” were realized and the very bombast of his work was glorified as “typically American.”

And yet, for all his overstressed muscularity, Miller is strangely lacking in creative energy. His exuberance and whipped up rhetoric cannot disguise the essential weakness of his verse. It is, in spite of a certain breeziness and a few magnificent descriptions of cañons and mountain-chains, feeble as well as false, full of cheap heroics, atrocious taste and impossible men and women. (See Preface.) One or two individual poems, like “Crossing the Plains” and parts of his apostrophes to the Sierras, the Pacific Ocean and the Missouri river may live; the rest seem doomed to a gradual extinction.

From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled about the Continent. In 1887 he returned to California, dwelling on the Heights, helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring writers. He died there, after a determinedly picturesque life, in sight of the Golden Gate, in 1913.

BY THE PACIFIC OCEAN[^[2]]

Here room and kingly silence keep

Companionship in state austere;

The dignity of death is here,

The large, lone vastness of the deep.

Here toil has pitched his camp to rest:

The west is banked against the west.

Above yon gleaming skies of gold

One lone imperial peak is seen;

While gathered at his feet in green

Ten thousand foresters are told.

And all so still! so still the air

That duty drops the web of care.

Beneath the sunset’s golden sheaves

The awful deep walks with the deep,

Where silent sea-doves slip and sweep,

And commerce keeps her loom and weaves.

The dead red men refuse to rest;

Their ghosts illume my lurid West.

CROSSING THE PLAINS[^[3]]

What great yoked brutes with briskets low,

With wrinkled necks like buffalo,

With round, brown, liquid, pleading eyes,

That turn’d so slow and sad to you,

That shone like love’s eyes soft with tears,

That seem’d to plead, and make replies,

The while they bow’d their necks and drew

The creaking load; and looked at you.

Their sable briskets swept the ground,

Their cloven feet kept solemn sound.

Two sullen bullocks led the line,

Their great eyes shining bright like wine;

Two sullen captive kings were they,

That had in time held herds at bay,

And even now they crush’d the sod

With stolid sense of majesty,

And stately stepp’d and stately trod,

As if ’twere something still to be

Kings even in captivity.

FROM “BYRON”

In men whom men condemn as ill

I find so much of goodness still,

In men whom men pronounce divine

I find so much of sin and blot,

I do not dare to draw a line

Between the two, where God has not.

Edward Rowland Sill

Edward Rowland Sill was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 1841. In 1861 he was graduated from Yale and shortly thereafter his poor health compelled him West. After various unsuccessful experiments, he drifted into teaching, first in the high schools in Ohio, later in the English department of the University of California. His uncertain physical condition added to his mental uncertainty. Unable to ally himself either with the lethargic, conservative forces whom he hated or with the radicals whom he distrusted, Sill became an uncomfortable solitary; half rebellious, half resigned. During the last decade of his life, his brooding seriousness was less pronounced, a lighter irony took the place of his dark reflections.

The Hermitage, his first volume, was published in 1867, a later edition (including later poems) appearing in 1889. His two posthumous books are Poems (1887) and Hermione and Other Poems (1899).

Sill died, after bringing something of the Eastern culture to the West, in 1887.

SOLITUDE

All alone—alone,

Calm, as on a kingly throne,

Take thy place in the crowded land,

Self-centred in free self-command.

Let thy manhood leave behind

The narrow ways of the lesser mind:

What to thee are its little cares,

The feeble love or the spite it bears?

Let the noisy crowd go by:

In thy lonely watch on high,

Far from the chattering tongues of men,

Sitting above their call or ken,

Free from links of manner and form

Thou shalt learn of the wingéd storm—

God shall speak to thee out of the sky.

DARE YOU?

Doubting Thomas and loving John,

Behind the others walking on:—

“Tell me now, John, dare you be

One of the minority?

To be lonely in your thought,

Never visited nor sought,

Shunned with secret shrug, to go

Thro’ the world, esteemed its foe;

To be singled out and hissed,

Pointed at as one unblessed,

Warned against in whispers faint,

Lest the children catch a taint;

To bear off your titles well,—

Heretic and infidel?

If you dare, come now with me,

Fearless, confident, and free.”

“Thomas, do you dare to be

Of the great majority?

To be only, as the rest,

With Heaven’s creature comforts blessed;

To accept, in humble part,

Truth that shines on every heart;

Never to be set on high,

Where the envious curses fly;

Never name or fame to find,

Still outstripped in soul and mind;

To be hid, unless to God,

As one grass-blade in the sod,

Underfoot with millions trod?

If you dare, come with us, be

Lost in love’s great unity.”

Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His was a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful performer on various instruments), and it is not surprising that his verse emphasizes—even overstresses—the influence of music on poetry. He attended Oglethorpe College, graduating at the age of eighteen (1860), and, a year later, volunteered as a private in the Confederate army. After several months’ imprisonment (he had been captured while acting as signal officer on a blockade-runner), Lanier was released in February, 1865, returning from Point Lookout to Georgia on foot, accompanied only by his flute, from which he refused to be separated. His physical health, never the most robust, had been frightfully impaired by his incarceration, and he was already suffering from tuberculosis, the rest of his life being spent in an unequal struggle against it.

He was now only twenty-three years old and the problem of choosing a vocation was complicated by his marriage in 1867. He spent five years in the study and practice of law, during which time he wrote comparatively little verse. But the law could not hold him; he felt premonitions of death and realized he must devote his talents to art before it was too late. He was fortunate enough to obtain a position as flautist with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 1873 in Baltimore, where he had free access to the music and literature he craved. Here he wrote all of his best poetry. In 1879, he was made lecturer on English in Johns Hopkins University, and it was for his courses there that he wrote his chief prose work, a brilliant if not conclusive study, The Science of English Verse. Besides his poetry, he wrote several books for boys, the two most popular being The Boy’s Froissart (1878) and The Boy’s King Arthur (1880).

Lanier’s poetry, charming though most of it is, suffers from his all too frequent theorizing, his too conscious effort to bring verse over into the province of pure music. He thought almost entirely, even in his most intellectual conceptions, in terms of musical form. His main theory that English verse has for its essential basis not accent but a strict musical quantity is a wholly erroneous conclusion, possible only to one who could write “whatever turn I have for art is purely musical—poetry being with me a mere tangent into which I shoot.” Lanier is at his best in his ballads, although a few of his lyrics have a similar spontaneity. In spite of the fact that he had rather novel schemes of rhythm and stanza-structure, much of his work is marred by strained effects, elaborate conceits and a kind of verse that approaches mere pattern-making. But such a vigorous ballad as “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” lyrics like “Night and Day” and “The Stirrup Cup,” and parts of the symphonic “Hymns of the Marshes” are sure of a place in American literature. Never a great figure, he was one of the most interesting and spiritual of our minor poets.

Lanier died, a victim of his disease, in the mountains of North Carolina, September 7, 1881.

SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHEE[^[4]]

Out of the hills of Habersham,

Down the valleys of Hall,

I hurry amain to reach the plain,

Run the rapid and leap the fall,

Split at the rock and together again,

Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,

And flee from folly on every side

With a lover’s pain to attain the plain

Far from the hills of Habersham,

Far from the valleys of Hall.

All down the hills of Habersham,

All through the valleys of Hall,

The rushes cried Abide, abide,

The willful waterweeds held me thrall,

The laving laurel turned my tide,

The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay,

The dewberry dipped for to work delay,

And the little reeds sighed Abide, abide,

Here in the hills of Habersham,

Here in the valleys of Hall.

High o’er the hills of Habersham,

Veiling the valleys of Hall,

The hickory told me manifold

Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall

Wrought me her shadowy self to hold,

The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine,

Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign,

Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold

Deep shades of the hills of Habersham,

These glades in the valleys of Hall.

And oft in the hills of Habersham,

And oft in the valleys of Hall,

The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone

Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,

And many a luminous jewel lone

—Crystals clear or acloud with mist,

Ruby, garnet and amethyst—

Made lures with the lights of streaming stone

In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,

In the beds of the valleys of Hall.

But oh, not the hills of Habersham,

And oh, not the valleys of Hall

Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.

Downward the voices of Duty call—

Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,

The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,

And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,

And the lordly main from beyond the plain

Calls o’er the hills of Habersham,

Calls through the valleys of Hall.

NIGHT AND DAY[^[5]]

The innocent, sweet Day is dead.

Dark Night hath slain her in her bed.

O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed!

—Put out the light, said he.

A sweeter light than ever rayed

From star of heaven or eye of maid

Has vanished in the unknown Shade

—She’s dead, she’s dead, said he.

Now, in a wild, sad after-mood

The tawny Night sits still to brood

Upon the dawn-time when he wooed

—I would she lived, said he.

Star-memories of happier times,

Of loving deeds and lovers’ rhymes,

Throng forth in silvery pantomimes.

—Come back, O Day! said he.

FROM “THE MARSHES OF GLYNN”[^[6]]

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,

Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies

In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies:

By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod

I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:

Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within

The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea

Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:

Look how the grace of the sea doth go

About and about through the intricate channels that flow

Here and there,

Everywhere,

Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,

And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,

That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow

In the rose-and-silver evening glow.

Farewell, my lord Sun!

The creeks overflow; a thousand rivulets run

’Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;

Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;

Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;

And the sea and the marsh are one.

How still the plains of the waters be!

The tide in his ecstasy.

The tide is at his highest height:

And it is night.

And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep

Roll in on the souls of men,

But who will reveal to our waking ken

The forms that swim and the shapes that creep

Under the waters of sleep?

And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in

On the length and breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.

Charles Edward Carryl

Charles Edward Carryl, father of Guy Wetmore Carryl (see page [142]), was born in New York City, December 30, 1842. He was an officer and director in various railroads but found leisure to write two of the few worthy rivals of the immortal Alice in Wonderland. These two, Davy and the Goblin (1884), which has gone through twenty printings, and The Admiral’s Caravan (1891), contain many lively and diverting ballads as well as inspired nonsense verses in the manner of his model who, in spite of the slight difference in spelling, was also a Carroll.

C. E. Carryl lived the greater part of his life in New York, but on retiring from business, removed to Boston and lived there until his death, which occurred in the summer of 1920.

THE PLAINT OF THE CAMEL

“Canary-birds feed on sugar and seed,

Parrots have crackers to crunch;

And as for the poodles, they tell me the noodles

Have chickens and cream for their lunch.

But there’s never a question

About MY digestion—

Anything does for me!

“Cats, you’re aware, can repose in a chair,

Chickens can roost upon rails;

Puppies are able to sleep in a stable,

And oysters can slumber in pails.

But no one supposes

A poor Camel dozes—

Any place does for me!

“Lambs are enclosed where it’s never exposed,

Coops are constructed for hens;

Kittens are treated to houses well heated,

And pigs are protected by pens.

But a Camel comes handy

Wherever it’s sandy—

Anywhere does for me!

“People would laugh if you rode a giraffe,

Or mounted the back of an ox;

It’s nobody’s habit to ride on a rabbit,

Or try to bestraddle a fox.

But as for a Camel, he’s

Ridden by families—

Any load does for me!

“A snake is as round as a hole in the ground;

Weasels are wavy and sleek;

And no alligator could ever be straighter

Than lizards that live in a creek.

But a Camel’s all lumpy

And bumpy and humpy—

Any shape does for me!”

ROBINSON CRUSOE’S STORY

The night was thick and hazy

When the “Piccadilly Daisy”

Carried down the crew and captain in the sea;

And I think the water drowned ’em;

For they never, never found ’em

And I know they didn’t come ashore with me.

Oh! ’twas very sad and lonely

When I found myself the only

Population on this cultivated shore;

But I’ve made a little tavern

In a rocky little cavern,

And I sit and watch for people at the door.

I spent no time in looking

For a girl to do my cooking,

As I’m quite a clever hand at making stews;

But I had that fellow Friday,

Just to keep the tavern tidy,

And to put a Sunday polish on my shoes.

I have a little garden

That I’m cultivating lard in,

As the things I eat are rather tough and dry;

For I live on toasted lizards,

Prickly pears, and parrot gizzards,

And I’m really very fond of beetle-pie.

The clothes I had were furry,

And it made me fret and worry

When I found the moths were eating off the hair;

And I had to scrape and sand ’em,

And I boiled ’em and I tanned ’em,

Till I got the fine morocco suit I wear.

I sometimes seek diversion

In a family excursion

With the few domestic animals you see;

And we take along a carrot

As refreshment for the parrot,

And a little can of jungleberry tea.

Then we gather as we travel,

Bits of moss and dirty gravel,

And we chip off little specimens of stone;

And we carry home as prizes

Funny bugs, of handy sizes,

Just to give the day a scientific tone.

If the roads are wet and muddy

We remain at home and study,—

For the Goat is very clever at a sum,—

And the Dog, instead of fighting,

Studies ornamental writing,

While the Cat is taking lessons on the drum.

We retire at eleven,

And we rise again at seven;

And I wish to call attention, as I close,

To the fact that all the scholars

Are correct about their collars,

And particular in turning out their toes.

James Whitcomb Riley

James Whitcomb Riley, who was possibly the most widely read native poet of his day, was born October 7, 1849, in Greenfield, Indiana, a small town twenty miles from Indianapolis, where he spent his later years. Contrary to the popular belief, Riley was not, as many have gathered from his bucolic dialect poems, a struggling child of the soil; his father was a lawyer in comfortable circumstances and Riley was not only given a good education but was prepared for the law. His temperament, however, craved something more adventurous. At eighteen he shut the heavy pages of Blackstone, slipped out of the office and joined a traveling troupe of actors who sold patent medicines during the intermissions. Riley’s functions were varied: he beat the bass-drum, painted their flaring banners, wrote local versions of old songs, coached the actors and, when occasion arose, took part in the performance himself.

Even before this time, Riley had begun to send verses to the newspapers, frank experiments, bits of homely sentiment, simple snatches and elaborate hoaxes—the poem “Leonainie,” published over the initials “E. A. P.,” being accepted in many quarters as a newly discovered poem by Poe. In 1882, when he was on the staff of the Indianapolis Journal, he began the series of dialect poems which he claimed were by a rude and unlettered farmer, one “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone, the Hoosier poet”—printing long extracts from “Boone’s” ungrammatical and badly-spelt letters to prove his find. A collection of these rustic verses appeared, in 1883, as The Ole Swimmin’ Hole; and Riley leaped into widespread popularity.

Other collections followed rapidly: Afterwhiles (1887), Old-Fashioned Roses (1888), Pipes o’ Pan at Zekesbury (1889), Rhymes of Childhood (1890). All met an instant response; Riley endeared himself, by his homely idiom and his childlike ingenuity, to a countryful of readers, adolescent and adult.

But Riley’s simplicity is not always as artless as it seems. Time and again, one can see him trading wantonly on the emotions of his unsophisticated readers; he sees them about to smile—and broadens the point of his joke; he observes them on the point of tears—and pulls out the sobbing tremolo stop. In many respects, he is patently the most artificial of those poets who claim to give us the stuff of the soil. He is the poet of obtrusive sentiment rather than of quiet convictions; of lulling assurance, of philosophies that never disturb his readers, of sweet truisms rather than searching truths.

That work of his which may endure, will survive because of the personal flavor that Riley often fused into it. Such poems as “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” “The Raggedy Man,” “Our Hired Girl” are a part of American folk literature; “Little Orphant Annie” is read wherever there is a schoolhouse or, for that matter, a nursery. In 1912 the schools throughout the country observed his birthday.

Riley died in his little house in Lockerbie Street, Indianapolis, July 22, 1916.

“WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN”[^[7]]

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,

And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,

And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,

And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;

O, it’s then the time a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,

With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,

As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere

When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—

Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,

And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;

But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze

Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days

Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,

And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn;

The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still

A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;

The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;

The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover overhead!—

O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps

Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps;

And your cider-makin’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through

With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage too!...

I don’t know how to tell it—but ef such a thing could be

As the angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me—

I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

A PARTING GUEST[^[8]]

What delightful hosts are they—

Life and Love!

Lingeringly I turn away,

This late hour, yet glad enough

They have not withheld from me

Their high hospitality.

So, with face lit with delight

And all gratitude, I stay

Yet to press their hands and say,

“Thanks.—So fine a time! Good night.”

Eugene Field

Although born (September 3, 1850) in St. Louis, Missouri, Eugene Field belongs to the literature of the far West. Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region claimed him as their own and Field never repudiated the allegiance; he even called most of his poetry “Western Verse.”

Field’s area of education embraced New England, Missouri, and what European territory he could cover in six months. At twenty-three he became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal, the rest of his life being given, with a dogged devotion, to journalism. Driven by the demands of his unique daily columns (those on the Denver Tribune [1881–1883] and the Chicago Daily News [1883–1895] were widely copied), Field first capitalized and then standardized his high spirits, his erudition, his whimsicality, his fondness for children. He wrote so often with his tongue in his cheek that it is difficult to say where true sentiment stops and an exaggerated sentimentality begins. “Field,” says Fred Lewis Pattee, in his detailed study of American Literature Since 1870, “more than any other writer of the period, illustrates the way the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the newspaper. Every scrap of Field’s voluminous product was written for immediate newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent—he made them up from newspaper fragments.... He was a pioneer in a peculiar province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man of letters a mere newspaper reporter.”

Though Field still may be overrated in some quarters, there is little doubt that certain of his child lyrics, his homely philosophic ballads (in the vein which Harte and Riley popularized) and his brilliant burlesques will occupy a niche in American letters. Readers of all tastes will find much to surprise and delight them in A Little Book of Western Verse (1889), With Trumpet and Drum (1892), A Second Book of Verse (1893) and those remarkable versions (and perversions) of Horace, Echoes from the Sabine Farm (1893) written in collaboration with his equally adroit brother, Roswell M. Field. A complete one-volume edition of his verse was issued in 1910.

Field died in Chicago, Illinois, November 4, 1895.

OUR TWO OPINIONS[^[9]]

Us two wuz boys when we fell out,—

Nigh to the age uv my youngest now;

Don’t rec’lect what ’twuz about,

Some small deeff’rence, I’ll allow.

Lived next neighbors twenty years,

A-hatin’ each other, me ’nd Jim,—

He having his opinyin uv me,

’Nd I havin’ my opinyin uv him.

Grew up together ’nd wouldn’t speak,

Courted sisters, ’nd marr’d ’em, too;

’Tended same meetin’-house oncet a week,

A-hatin’ each other through ’nd through!

But when Abe Linkern asked the West

F’r soldiers, we answered,—me ’nd Jim,—

He havin’ his opinyin uv me,

’Nd I havin’ my opinyin uv him.

But down in Tennessee one night

Ther’ wuz sound uv firin’ fur away,

’Nd the sergeant allowed ther’d be a fight

With the Johnnie Rebs some time nex’ day;

’Nd as I wuz thinkin’ uv Lizzie ’nd home

Jim stood afore me, long ’nd slim,—

He havin’ his opinyin uv me,

’Nd I havin’ my opinyin uv him.

Seemed like we knew there wuz goin’ to be

Serious trouble f’r me ’nd him;

Us two shuck hands, did Jim ’nd me,

But never a word from me or Jim!

He went his way ’nd I went mine,

’Nd into the battle’s roar went we,—

I havin’ my opinyin of Jim,

’Nd he havin’ his opinyin uv me.

Jim never came back from the war again,

But I hain’t forgot that last, last night

When, waitin’ f’r orders, us two men

Made up ’nd shuck hands, afore the fight,

’Nd after it all, it’s soothin’ to know

That here I be ’nd younder’s Jim,—

He havin’ his opinyin uv me,

’Nd I havin’ my opinyin uv him.

LITTLE BOY BLUE[^[10]]

The little toy dog is covered with dust,

But sturdy and staunch he stands;

The little toy soldier is red with rust,

And his musket moulds in his hands.

Time was when the little toy dog was new,

And the soldier was passing fair;

And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue

Kissed them and put them there.

“Now don’t you go till I come,” he said,

“And don’t you make any noise!”

So, toddling off to his trundle bed,

He dreamt of the pretty toys;

And, as he was dreaming, an angel song

Awakened our Little Boy Blue—

Oh! the years are many, the years are long,

But the little toy friends are true!

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,

Each in the same old place,

Awaiting the touch of a little hand,

The smile of a little face;

And they wonder, as waiting the long years through

In the dust of that little chair,

What has become of our Little Boy Blue,

Since he kissed them and put them there.

SEEIN’ THINGS[^[11]]

I ain’t afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or mice,

An’ things ’at girls are skeered uv I think are awful nice!

I’m pretty brave I guess; an’ yet I hate to go to bed,

For, when I’m tucked up warm an’ snug an’ when my prayers are said,

Mother tells me “Happy Dreams” an’ takes away the light,

An’ leaves me lyin’ all alone an’ seein’ things at night!

Sometimes they’re in the corner, sometimes they’re by the door,

Sometimes they’re all a-standin’ in the middle uv the floor;

Sometimes they are a-sittin’ down, sometimes they’re walkin’ round

So softly and so creepy-like they never make a sound!

Sometimes they are as black as ink, an’ other times they’re white—

But color ain’t no difference when you see things at night!

Once, when I licked a feller ’at had just moved on our street,

An’ father sent me up to bed without a bite to eat,

I woke up in the dark an’ saw things standin’ in a row,

A-lookin’ at me cross-eyed an’ p’intin’ at me—so!

Oh, my! I wuz so skeered ’at time I never slep’ a mite—

It’s almost alluz when I’m bad I see things at night!

Lucky thing I ain’t a girl or I’d be skeered to death!

Bein’ I’m a boy, I duck my head an’ hold my breath.

An’ I am, oh so sorry I’m a naughty boy, an’ then