“And Lesser Things”
_“—— and Other Poets”, by Louis Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt
and Company._
Very, very clever. The ultimate emptiness of cleverness. These parodies
are “not a piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition”,—the
poet expects them to approach this “elevated and illuminating” standard;
but they never reach satire, which is really the thing that is covered
by the above quotation from Isaac Disraeli.
Untermeyer’s verse, including _Challenge_ and that so quantitatively
published in the magazines,—still speaking comparatively,—has the same
relation to poetry as Urban’s scenery for _The Follies_ has to his
Boston Opera settings; or of all of Urban’s work to that of the numerous
German poster school of five or eight years ago. Untermeyer is lenient
in parodying poets of his own ilk—but it is easy to determine which of
those he does not respect by his obvious, spiteful absurdities.
For years now newspaper paragraphers, “poets”, and editors have been
saying such things as “It is time we are getting ourselves talked about”
when mentioning Ezra Pound. Untermeyer stoops to it; he is still the
“once born” when being “critical” about Amy Lowell: “A blue herring
sings”. What he is really parodying here is his colleague Walt Mason’s
prose-printed jingles which are syndicated throughout newspaperdom; he
is not giving a “critical exposition” of polyphonic prose. It will need
a keener critic or poet than he to do it—or to produce a parody or
satire whose art equals that of the thing satired—Masters’s things for
example. By ambling through thirty-seven lines Untermeyer imagines that
he is being master of the situation as regards Masters. And the last
line of the parody on James Oppenheim might very well have been written
by Untermeyer himself as one of his own: “Clad in the dazzling splendor
of my awakened self”.... No matter what may have been your attitude
toward the poets parodied these things leave your feelings
unchanged—except that he makes more definite your attitude towards him.