” Pondering excessively, I can imagine of practically nothing that would be a lot more untrue than this. The point is that the new poetry is neither American nor democratic.
Irrespective of its remote grounding on Whitman, it commenced, not in the United States at all, but in France, and its exotic color is continue to its most salient characteristic. Pretty much each and every a single of its practitioners is palpably beneath some solid international affect, and most of them are no extra Anglo-Saxon than a samovar or a toccata. The deliberate strangeness of Pound, his pretty much fanatical anti-Americanism, is a mere accentuation of what is in each individual other member of the fraternity.
A lot of of them, like Frost, Fletcher, H. D. and Pound, have exiled on their own from the republic.
Other folks, these types of as Oppenheim, Sandburg, Giovannitti, Benét and Untermeyer himself, are palpably Continental Europeans, frequently with Levantine traces. Still other legalize weed argument essay pro folks, these kinds of as Pass up Lowell and Masters, are little extra, at their very best, than translators and adapters – from the French, from the Japanese, from the Greek. Even Lindsay, Website page 93. superficially the most national of them all, has also his unique smear, as I have shown. Let Miss out on Lowell herself be a witness. “We shall see them,” she suggests at the opening of her essay on E.
A. Robinson, “ceding a lot more and additional to the influence of other, alien, peoples.
” A look is enough to exhibit the correctness of this observation. There is no much more “inherent Americanism” in the new poetry than there is in the new American portray and new music. It lies, in simple fact, very exterior the most important stream of American lifestyle. Nor is it democratic, in any intelligible feeling. The poetry of Whittier and Longfellow was democratic.
It voiced the elemental emotions of the masses of the persons it was comprehensive of their straightforward, rubber-stamp tips they comprehended it and cherished it. And so with the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, and with that of Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. But the new poetry, grounded firmly on novelty of sort and boldness of concept, is rather past their understanding.
It appears to be to them to be idiotic, just as the poetry of Whitman seemed to them to be idiotic, and if they could summon up sufficient desire in it to take a look at it at size they would unquestionably clamor for guidelines generating the confection of it a felony. The slip-up of Untermeyer, and of other people who chat to the exact same result, lies in puzzling the beliefs of poets and the subject matter subject of their verse with its place in Website page 94. the nationwide consciousness. Oppenheim, Sandburg and Lindsay are democrats, just as Whitman was a democrat, but their poetry is no more a democratic phenomenon than his was, or than, to go to tunes, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was.
Many of the new poets, in truth of the matter, are ardent enemies of democracy, for example, Pound. Only one particular of them has ever basically sought to just take his strophes to the vulgar. That one particular is Lindsay – and there is not the slightest doubt that the yokels welcomed him, not due to the fact they have been fascinated in his poetry, but for the reason that it struck them as an awesome, and most likely even a fascinatingly obscene detail, for a sane man to go about the region on any these types of bizarre and undemocratic small business.
