Some fifty years ago, more or less, a handful of unrelated men and women took to being born up and down these United States. What impulse was responsible for them, what submerged law of change and contradiction settled upon them as its tools, it is a little hard to say—at least, to say in any sort of reasonable compass. They appear to have been sporadic efforts of some force or other, operating over a period of nearly fifteen years; but so disconnected were they, geographically, socially, and atavistically, that one thing is certain: however they may have derived from a central urge, they did not derive in the least from one another. This little handful of disconnected souls, all unobtrusively born into that America which sighed with Richard Watson Gilder, wept with Ella Wheeler Wilcox, permitted itself to dance delicately with Celia Thaxter, and occasionally to blow a graceful blast on the beribboned trumpet of Louise Imogen Guiney, was destined to startle its progenitors. This was a world of sweet appreciation, a devotee of caged warblers, which species of gentle music-makers solaced it monthly from the pages of the 'Century' or the 'Atlantic Monthly.' How pleasant to turn away for a moment from the rattle of drays and horse-cars and listen to a woodland strain repeated in a familiar and well-loved cadence! That these robins of ours were doing their best to imitate the notes of English blackbirds and nightingales only made their efforts the more precious, and, to be sure, their imitations were done with a modesty worthy of all admiration. They knew their place in the world's harmony and saw to it that they did not overstep it. This was expected and loyally adhered to. What of America had time for these not too exciting titivations of the emotions harkened and was pleased; the busy rest of the populace heeded not at all and missed very little.

Now, how it was that a handful of young persons, growing up in the seventies and eighties (for the widely spaced arrivals lasted so long), found themselves, one and all, so out of sympathy with the chaste and saccharine music wandering through the ambient air of current periodicals, is one of the wonders of psychological phenomena. It is a fact, nevertheless, that with no one to talk to or compare notes with, each as separate as conditions could well make him, one and all they revolted against the taste of their acquaintances, and launched, the whole flotilla of them, out into the turbulent sea of experiment and personal expression.

Upheavals make for art, as is well known. The debacle of the Franco-Prussian war gave France the galaxy of poets and musicians which made the last two decades of the nineteenth century so rich a period in her annals. But here, in America, there had been no war sufficiently recent to cause an effect of leaf-turning. The Civil War was too long gone by. (No, the change in poetry seems to have sprung from something far more prosaic. From the great tide of commerce and manufacture, indeed. Prosperity is the mother of art, no matter how odd such an idea may seem. Look at the Elizabethan age in England. It followed immediately upon an expansion of the world's markets, did it not? But this expansion was all bound up with the romance of daring adventure and exploration. Quite so, and was not ours? A continent crossed and settled at infinite peril; rivers run into clacking factories; electricity caught and chained to wires, forcing the very air to obedient echo -- are not such things as these romantic and adventurous? Whether people had the wit to see them in this light or not, the little devils who rule the psychological currents which man ignores and invariably obeys found them so. Nemesis is extraordinarily ironical. While the men of the race were making fortunes, and the women were going to concerts and puzzling their heads over a Browning whom, having invented themselves, they could not in the least understand, so different was he from dear Mr. Gilder—while all this was going on, in New England, the Middle West, in Pennsylvania and Arkansas, by one, and one, and one, like beads before they are strung upon a string, the makers of this poetic renaissance of ours were obscurely working all toward one end and that as various as the strands in a piece of rope.

Who the pioneers of this movement were, I am not going to say. They are perfectly well known to every one interested in present-day literature. Besides, we are still too near to them to render absolute statement possible. Were a suffrage taken, some names would appear in all lists, others would differ. Time alone can make the actual personnel of the movement secure. My intention here is to analyse a movement, not criticize individual talents. When I mention such, I do so as illustration merely.

With all their diversity, there was a central aim which bound the group together. Conscious with some, unconscious with others, their aim was to voice America. Now you cannot voice one country in the accents of another. Therefore the immediate object of these poets was to drop the perpetual imitation of England. It is interesting, if painful, to realize what a desperately hard time these young poets had. When they could get themselves printed, which was seldom, they were either completely ignored or furiously lampooned. And still they were alone, none knew the others; but they were a courageous little band, and on they went, writing, and putting their poems in their writing-table drawers.

Suddenly, explosively, the movement came to a head in 1912 and the years immediately succeeding. In October, 1912, Harriet Monroe brought out her magazine 'Poetry,' but, splendid work though that magazine has done, I cannot subscribe to its often expressed opinion that it is largely responsible for the recognition the group began to achieve. Instead I should say that it was another manifestation of the fulminating spirit which produced the poets themselves. Every one of these poets had been writing for years, some of them for many years, others were already the authors of neglected volumes, before 'Poetry' arrived on the scene. It seems to me rather that the ferment had reached a point when it was bound to burst. For burst it did and bore down on the American consciousness with an indomitable violence not to be resisted. Horrified professors shuddered and took to umbrellas and arctics, newspaper fulminators tried all the weapons in their armories from snubs to guffaws. It was no use; what must come, comes. The caged warblers were swept out of court. The people who hated the new poetry were forced back on the classical old which antedated the warbler era. And that alone was a good thing.

But this movement which we speak of so glibly, do we really know what it was? Let us observe it a little. In the first place, it was an effort to free the individual from the expression of the herd; in the second, it had for its object the breaking down of mere temperamental barriers. This looks like paradox, but it is not. The poetry of the two preceding decades had been almost entirely concerned with recording personal emotions, but recording them in a perfectly stereotyped way. The new poetry found that emotions were not confined to the conjugation of the verb to love, and whether it said 'I love' or 'Behold the earth and all that is thereon,' if it followed its natural inclination, it would say it quite differently from the way its fathers had said it. The truth is that this new poetry, whether written by men or women, was in essence masculine, virile, very much alive. Where the nineties had warbled, it was prone to shout. When it concerned itself with love, its speech was natural and unrestrained; when not concerned with love, it found interests as manifold as the humanity crowding on its eyes from every street corner. It had so much to say that it simply could not say it, and so huge a country to speak for that no one poet could do more than present a little bylane of it. It took the whole handful of poets which made up the group to give any adequate expression of the movement or the age which produced it; but, taking the work by and large, book after book, here was a volume of energy, a canvas so wide and sparkling, that something very like the dazzling tapestry of American life, thought, and activities was obtained.

As the poets were, so was their work. One gave simple facts; another approached the central truth obliquely; a third abandoned America as far as direct allusion went, and presented it the more clearly in reactions on distant countries and periods viewed through American eyes. For instance, take Frost and Sandburg and juxtapose them with 'H. D.' Not one of these three could have sprung from any country but America, and yet where Frost and Sandburg portray their special countrysides, town and open, 'H. D.' occupies herself with an ancient loveliness alive again through the eager vision of a young race to which nothing is stale. Wherever posterity may place the group in the role of American poets, one thing it cannot deny them: the endeavour after a major utterance. They may have failed; they dared the stars. They hitched their wagons to the tails of comets. There was nothing the matter with their aim; success is another thing, and not for us to gauge.

The world learnt to like them pretty well, although they were not very much understood. It is not the way of our modern world to accord greatness its due, even when it slyly supposes that it may exist. The very feeble educations which are all most of us can boast tend to caution rather than to acclaim. It is safer to doubt, for then the odds are with you. No, the world was interested, but took refuge in the old cry: 'These men are precursors, we await the great poet for whom they are clearing the way.' And what happened? Rather a curious thing. At first the pioneers rolled up their tallies of disciples. Incipient 'Spoon Rivers' rippled on every side; bits of here, there, and everywhere a la Frost appeared; red-blooded followers travestied Sandburg's least successful pictures, stupidly unaware that it was his tenderness and insight which made him the man he was; the Imagists almost despaired of ever freeing themselves from the milkand-water imitations with which young hopefuls flooded the non-paying magazines. Still the great poet who was to go all of them one better did not make his appearance. Instead came a volte-face. Reaction, by Jove! Or so it appeared. Reaction after ten years! But things move swiftly nowadays.

The bewildered elders rubbed their eyes. Had all their work been in vain? By no means, for the reaction owed more to them than it has ever been willing to acknowledge. Without them, the younger poets could not have existed. Now, constant reaction is a law of art. When one impulse is exhausted, the artistic undercurrents turn to another. Finding it impossible to outdistance the pioneers on their own ground, the next generation veered off at a tangent and sought other grounds of its own. But a reaction, to be effective, must produce poets of something like the calibre of the poets reacted from. Without attempting to answer this question one way or the other, we can, at least, peer a little more closely at the type of poetry coming on the stage to-day.

The younger group appears to be composed of two entirely distinct companies. Unlike the pioneers, who had among them the tie of a concerted effort, these two sections are completely at variance with one another. To name them: one calls itself the Secessionists; the other we may christen, for purposes of differentiation, the Lyrists. It is not a very good name, for all poets write lyrics, but as these poets write practically nothing else, it will serve. Of these two groups, the lyrists are unquestionably doing the better work. They proclaim no tenets, but confine themselves to writing poetry, and doing it uncommonly well. Their expertness is really amazing. They have profited by the larger movement in finding an audience readymade to their hands, a number of magazines eager to welcome them, and a considerable body Of critical writing bearing on the poetical problems of the Moment—aids to achievement which the older group entirely lacked. Through the practice of the elders, the younger group has learnt to in slough off the worst faults of the nineties, and, in the matter of versification, there is scarcely a fault to be found with their work. I refer, of course, to that of the leaders. The strange thing here, however, the crux of the reactionary situation, is its aim. For where the older generation aimed at a major expression, these younger poets are directly forcing themselves to adhere to a minor one. The terms major and minor in poetry have nothing to do with good and bad; a minor poet is often meticulously careful and exceedingly fine. Major and minor refer to outlook, and it is a fact that this younger group deliberately seeks the narrow, personal note. It is a symptom, I suppose, a weariness of far horizons, a breath-taking before a final leap.

Where emotion is the chief stock in trade, we should not expect a high degree of intellectual content, yet in one member of the group we find it. Elinor Wylie, who, unlike Edna St. Vincent Millay, that delightfully clever exponent of the perennial theme of love, is one of the most intellectual and well equipped of American poets. These two are the acknowledged chiefs of the company. For, while the older movement was innately masculine, the new one is all feminine. It is, indeed, a feminine movement, and remains such even in the work of its men.

The Secessionists are quite apart. Their object is science rather than art; or perhaps it is fairer to say that to them art is akin to mathematics. They are much intrigued by structure, in a sense quite other than that in which it is usually employed in poetry. They have a host of theories, and are most interesting when stating them, but the doubt arises whether a movement which concerns itself more with statements about poetry than with the making of poetry itself is ever going to produce works of art of a quality to justify the space taken up by prominciamentos.

The outcome of all this is somewhat hazy. It is a fact that, side by side with the youths, the elders are still writing. Whether the younger group will sweep aside the older, it is too soon to see. That the far easier poetry of the lyrists will be, and is, immensely popular, is only natural. The question is, how long can it maintain itself in the face of its wilfully restricted limits? Whether the future will bring a period of silence preceding another vigorous dash forward, or whether the present feminine mood will lead directly into the next advance, who shall say? Not I, at any rate. Both possibilities are in order, and for the present I think we may be satisfied. The time has been short, and considerable has been done in a variety of ways by the two generations at the moment writing. As Whitman said, here is 'a lapful of seed, and this is a fine country.'

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