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.