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.