Miss Amy Lowell, America's chief advocate and practitioner of the new
poetry, would wear, I supposed, a gown by Bakst, with many Oriental
jewels. And incense would be burning in a golden basin. And Miss Lowell
would say that the art of poetry was discovered in 1916.
But there is nothing exotic or artificial about Miss Lowell's appearance
and surroundings. Nor did the author of _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_
express, when I talked to her the other day, any of the extravagant
opinions which conservative critics attribute to the _vers libristes_.
Miss Lowell talked with the practicality which is of New England and the
serenity which is of Boston; she was positive, but not narrowly
dogmatic; she is keenly appreciative of contemporary poetry, but she has
the fullest sense of the value of the great heritage of poetical
tradition that has come down to us through the ages.
There is so much careless talk of _imagisme_, _vers libre_, and the new
poetry in general that I thought it advisable to begin our talk by
asking for a definition or a description of the new poetry. In reply to
my question Miss Lowell said:
"The thing that makes me feel sure that there is a future in the new
poetry is the fact that those who write it follow so many different
lines of thought. The new poetry is so large a subject that it can
scarcely be covered by one definition. It seems to me that there are
four definite sorts of new poetry, which I will attempt to describe.
"One branch of the new poetry may be called the realistic school. This
branch is descended partly from Whitman and partly from the
prose-writers of France and England. The leading exponents of it are
Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters. These two poets are different from
each other, but they both are realists, they march under the same
banner.
"Another branch of the new poetry consists of the poets whose work shows
a mixture of the highly imaginative and the realistic. Their thought
verges on the purely imaginative, but is corrected by a scientific
attitude of mind. I suppose that this particular movement in English
poetry may be said to have started with Coleridge, but in England the
movement hardly attained its due proportions. Half of literary England
followed Wordsworth, half followed Byron. It is in America that we find
the greatest disciple of Coleridge in the person of Edgar Allan Poe. The
force of the movement then went back to France, where it showed clearly
in Mallarme and the later symbolists. To-day we see this tendency
somewhat popularized in Vachell Lindsay, although perhaps he does not
know it. And if I may be so bold as to mention myself, I should say that
I in common with most other imagists belong to this branch, that I am at
once a fantasist and a realist.
"Thirdly, we have the lyrico-imaginative type of poet. Of this branch
the best example that I can call to mind is John Gould Fletcher. The
fourth group of the new poets consists of those who are descended
straight from Matthew Arnold. They show the Wordsworth influence
corrected by experience and education. Browning is in their line of
descent. Characteristics of their work are high seriousness,
astringency, and a certain pruning down of poetry so that redundancy is
absolutely avoided. Of this type the most striking example is Edwin
Arlington Robinson."
"Miss Lowell," I said, "the opponents of the new poetry generally attack
it chiefly on account of its form--or rather, on account of its
formlessness. And yet what you have said has to do only with the idea
itself. You have said nothing about the way in which the idea is
expressed."
"There is no special form which is characteristic of the new poetry,"
said Miss Lowell, "and of course 'formlessness' is a word which is
applied to it only by the ignorant. The new poetry is in every form.
Edgar Lee Masters has written in _vers libre_ and in regular rhythm.
Robert Frost writes in blank verse. Vachell Lindsay writes in varied
rhyme schemes. I write in both the regular meters and the newer forms,
such as _vers libre_ and 'polyphonic prose.'
"It is a mistake to suppose, as many conservative critics do, that
modern poetry is a matter of _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ is not new, but
it is valuable to give vividness when vividness is desired. _Vers libre_
is a difficult thing to write well, and a very easy thing to write
badly. This particular branch of the new poetry movement has been
imitated so extensively that it has brought the whole movement into
disrepute in the eyes of casual observers. But we must remember that no
movement is to be judged by its obscure imitators. A movement must be
judged by the few people at its head who make the trend. There cannot be
many of them. In the history of the world there are only a few supreme
artists, only a small number of great artists, only a limited number of
good artists. And to suppose that we in America at this particular
moment can be possessed of many artists worthy of consideration is
ridiculous.
"Undoubtedly the fact that a great number of people are engaged to-day
in producing poetry is a great stimulus and helps to create a proper
atmosphere for those men whose work may live. For it is a curious fact
that the artistic names that have come down to us are those of men who
have lived in the so-called great artistic periods, when many other men
were working at the same thing."
I asked Miss Lowell to tell something of this _vers libre_ which is so
much discussed and so little understood. She said:
"_Vers libre_ is based upon rhythm. Its definition is 'A verse form
based upon cadence rather than upon exact meter.' It is a little
difficult to define cadence when dealing with poetry. I might call it
the sense of balance.
"The unit of _vers libre_ is the strophe, not the line or the foot, as
in regular meter. The strophe is a group of words which round themselves
satisfactorily to the ear. In short poems this complete rounding may
take place only at the end, making the poem a unit of a single movement,
the lines serving only to give the slight up-and-down effect necessary
to the voice when the poem is read aloud.
"In longer poems the strophe may be a group of lines. Poetry being a
spoken and not a written art, those not well versed in the various
poetic forms will find it simpler to read _vers libre_ poems aloud,
rather than to try to get their rhythm from the printed page. For people
who are used only to the exact meters, the printed arrangement of a
_vers libre_ poem is a confusing process. To a certain extent cadence is
dependent upon quantity--long and short syllables being of peculiar
importance. Words hurried over in reading are balanced by words on which
the reader pauses. Remember, also, that _vers libre_ can be either
rhymed or unrhymed."
"One objection," I said, "that many critics bring up against unrhymed
poetry is that it cannot be remembered."
"I cannot see that that is of the slightest importance," Miss Lowell
replied. "The music that we whistle when we come out of the theater is
not the greatest music we have heard.
"Zaccheus he
Did climb a tree
His Lord to see
is easily remembered. But I refuse to think that it is great poetry.
"The enemies of _vers libre_," she continued, "say that _vers libre_ is
in no respect different from oratory. Now, there is a difference between
the cadence of _vers libre_ and the cadence of oratory. Lincoln's
Gettysburg address is not _vers libre_, it is rhythmical prose. At the
prose end of cadence is rhythmical prose; at the verse end is _vers
libre_. The difference is in the kind of cadence.
"Recently a writer in _The Nation_ took some of Meredith's prose and
made it into _vers libre_ poems which any poet would have been glad to
write. Then he took some of my poems and turned them into prose, with a
result which he was kind enough to call beautiful. He then pertinently
asked what was the difference.
"I might answer that there is no difference. Typography is not relevant
to the discussion. Whether a thing is written as prose or as verse is
immaterial. But if we would see the advantage which Meredith's
imagination enjoyed in the freer forms of expression, we need only
compare these lyrical passages from his prose works with his own
metrical poetry."
I asked Miss Lowell about the charge that the new poets are lacking in
reverence for the great poets of the past. She believes that the charge
is unfounded. Nevertheless, she believes that the new poets do well to
take the New England group of writers less seriously than conservative
critics would have them take them.
"America has produced only two great poets, Whitman and Poe," said Miss
Lowell. "The rest of the early American poets were cultivated gentlemen,
but they were more exactly English provincial poets than American poets,
and they were decidedly inferior to the parent stock. The men of the New
England group, with the single exception of Emerson, were cultivated
gentlemen with a taste for literature--they never rose above that level.
"No one can judge his contemporaries. We cannot say with certainty that
the poets of this generation are better than their predecessors. But
surely we can see that the new poets have more originality, more of the
stuff out of which poetry is made, than their predecessors had, aside
from the two great exceptions that I have mentioned."
"What is the thing that American poetry chiefly needs?" I asked.
"Well," said Miss Lowell, "I wish that there were a great many changes
in our attitude toward literature. I wish that no man could expect to
make a living by writing. I wish that the magazines did not pay for
contributions--few of them do in France, you know. And I wish that the
newspapers did not try to review books. But the thing that we chiefly
need is informed and authoritative criticism.
"We have very few critics, we have practically none who are writing
separate books on contemporary verse. When I was writing my _French
Poets_ I read twenty or thirty books on contemporary French poetry,
serious books, written by critics who make a specialty of the poetry of
their own day.
"We have nothing like this in America. The men who write critical books
write of the literature of a hundred years ago. No critical mind is
bent toward contemporary verse. There are a few newspaper critics who
pay serious attention to contemporary verse--William Stanley
Braithwaite, O. W. Firkins, and Louis Untermeyer, for example--but there
are only a few of them.
"What is to be desired is for some one to be as interested in criticism
as the poets are in poetry. It was the regularity of Sainte-Beuve's
'Causeries du Lundi' that gave it its weight. What we want is a critic
like that, who is neither an old man despairing of a better job nor a
young man using his newspaper work as a stepping-stone to something
higher. Of course, brilliant criticisms of poetry appear from time to
time, but what we need is criticism as an institution.
"After all," said Miss Lowell, in conclusion, "there are only two kinds
of poetry, good poetry and bad poetry. The form of poetry is a matter of
individual idiosyncrasy. It is only the very young and the very old, the
very inexperienced or the numbed, who say, 'This is the only way in
which poetry shall be written!'"
_A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY_