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.