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Chapter 7.

III. THE INNOVATORS: FREE VERSE.

Adventures in Verse.

The second decade of the twentieth century is notable in the history of American verse; and interest centres in the year 1915 -- the year which saw the publication of Masters' Spoon River Anthology, Amy Lowell's A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (a second edition) and Robert Frost's North of Boston. Vachel Lindsay had published The Congo and Other Poems in the preceding year and in the year following Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems appeared. The appearance of these volumes heralded a new and somewhat startling development in poetical expression. Whatever the judgment of later years regarding the permanent value of free verse, the popularity and significance of the new movement cannot be ignored. The influence of Walt Whitman is obvious; but the spirit of the time -- its impatience with the formulas of the past, its revolt against the conventions and the limitations of tradition, the demand for freedom and a blunt reality, -- is unmistakable in the productions of these writers and those whom they represent. Their work should not be taken too seriously; to a great degree it is experimental, an episode, interesting and typical of the spirit of the age.

Edgar Lee Masters, born 1869.

The most remarkable of the volumes named is The Spoon River Anthology. Its author, born in Kansas, but since infancy living in Illinois, an attorney in Chicago, had published privately several modest volumes in both verse and prose before the Anthology appeared. His compositions had been in the conventional metres and had created no particular impression; the appearance of this book, however, produced a literary sensation. The Spoon River Anthology is a collection of epitaphs in which are told, with extraordinary condensation and a vivid realism, the life stories of an entire township for a generation. The form is free verse; the stories vary in character, but the sordid and tragic predominate; the tone is ironic, if not cynical. The purpose of the Anthology is to portray life with the faithfulness of one who has no illusions and who has been impressed by the drama of life in a community lapsed into moral decay. There is little question as to the power and place of Masters' work as an original and impressive piece of creative literature; its merit as poetry is a different matter. Subsequent volumes of Masters' verse, Songs and Satires (1916), The Great Valley (1916), Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock and Other Poems (1919), and Doomsday Book (1920) have not added to his reputation as a poet.

Amy Lowell, 1874-1925.

Miss Amy Lowell, one of a well-known Boston family, a leader in the group of free verse poets, published her first volume, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, in 1912, but her second volume, Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914) is more significant of her position in this movement. Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Can Grande's Castle (1918) and subsequent volumes further illustrate the peculiarities of the new school. Miss Lowell is versatile; she has written poems of distinction in the verse forms of the established order, but it is rather as one of the so-called Imagist poets that she takes her place in the modern group. The classification is not very definite, but certain rules formulated by the Imagists are, in brief, as follows:

1. "To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. "To create new rhythms -- as the expression of new moods -- and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon `free-verse' as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty....

3. "To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.... We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life.

4. "To present an image (hence the name: `Imagist').... We believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous....

5. "To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

6. "Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry." Robert Frost, born 1875.

Although Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, he is distinctively a New England poet and his two important volumes, North of Boston (1915) and Mountain Intervale (1916), are the natural product of the granite New Hampshire hills among which he made his home in 1900. For nearly three years (1912-1915) Robert Frost was in England with wife and children, living in a suburban town, making acquaintance with young English poets, and finding a needed stimulus in new associations. It was in London that his first volume of verse, A Boy's Will, was published, in 1913; his second volume, North of Boston (in its first edition), followed the next year. There are, however, no suggestions of the English environment in either volume. The poetry in the first volume, largely subjective, is more conventional than that which followed. The later poems are mainly narrative, -- serious, sometimes sombre tales, realistic, human, -- very true to the psychology of New England; but these are interspersed with brighter pastoral sketches like Mending Wall, Mowing, After Apple Picking, and Birches, poems which grow spontaneously out of the simple, toilful farm life. A word should be added with regard to the metrical form adopted by the poet as the medium of his verse. It is not that of the typical free verse poets -- yet it has all the freedom of that unconventional school. More closely resembling the ten-syllable line of the standard blank verse form, but with varying metre and stressed pauses together with an extra syllable where needed, the rhythm adjusts itself with an easy freedom to follow the natural tones of living speech.

Vachel Lindsay, born 1879.

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was born in Springfield, Illinois, a city to whose spiritual upbuilding he devoted no small amount of energy -- as witness the publication of The Golden Book of Springfield (1921). It was indeed as a preacher of the gospel of Beauty that Lindsay began his work, with a sincerity and an originality equally remarkable. On walking trips in the South and later while tramping across the state of Kansas and farther west, the poet carried a thin-leaved pamphlet of sixteen pages containing Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, "printed expressly as a substitute for money" to be exchanged for food and lodging while on his pilgrimage. A skillful draughtsman -- Lindsay had studied art in New York -- he illustrated with drawings and cartoons the gospel of Beauty which he proclaimed. The death of the great organizer and leader of the Salvation Army inspired the poem which introduced to its readers this new poet of the Middle West, -- General William Booth Enters Heaven. There was more than mere originality in this impressive composition, a lyric grotesquely conceived yet strikingly appropriate to its theme; a vociferous chant to the rhythm of a familiar Salvation Army hymn, accentuated by the beat of the bass drum and the jingle of tambourines. There was more than the mere unconventional license of the verse; there was a freedom of movement and a command of words, a power of imagination and a sense of the spiritual significance of the event that compelled a startled admiration for its daring and its success. This poem gave the title to Lindsay's first volume, in 1913. The Congo and Other Poems (1914) added two other compositions characteristic of this period of the poet's work. The title poem, "A Study of the Negro Race," was the first, with its accompaniment of boom and rattle, the chant of voodoo rites in the African jungle, rag time and cake walk revels, religious ecstacy -- a weird blending of noise and poetry. The second was The Santa Fé Trail, an epic of the automobile following the historic highway to the coast, to the honking music of the horns with lyric interludes of bird-song from the hedges where the Rachel-Jane --

"Not defeated by the horns
Sings amid a hedge of thorns:--
`Love and life,
Eternal youth--
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet,
Dew and glory,
Love and truth,
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.'"

The Chinese Nightingale (1917) continued this novel type of composition. All these poems are intended to be declaimed in a kind of chant -- the nature of which is suggested by explanatory notes in the margins. They are experiments in the ancient art of the bard and demand to be read aloud. A hearing of Lindsay's own declamation of these lyrics was almost essential to their effective interpretation.

Many shorter lyrics, notable for their dignity and beauty, accompany these longer and somewhat blatant compositions. A Net to Snare the Moonlight, How a Little Girl Danced, The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos, Love and Law, are representative of these.

Carl Sandburg, born 1878.

Carl Sandburg, most aggressive and most radical among the representatives of the "new" poetry, is like Lindsay and Masters, a product of the prairie state of Illinois. Born at Galesburg of Swedish stock, his youth was a youth of toil. Employed at various jobs -- on a milk-wagon, in the brick-yards, with a construction gang, in the wheat fields of Kansas, as a house painter; then serving in Porto Rico through the Spanish American war, Sandburg had already learned something of life when he returned to his home town to work his way through Lombard College. Eventually he found his place on the staff of a Chicago newspaper.

"I want the respect of intelligent men," the young man wrote; "but I will choose for myself the intelligent. I love art but I decide for myself what is art. I adore beauty but only my own soul shall tell me what is beauty. I worship God but I define and describe God for myself. I am an individual."

This is something more than an echo of Whitman and Emerson; it is the expression of an individuality seeking for the ideal, but determined to seek for it in his own way. Sandburg resembles Whitman more closely than any other of his contemporaries; -- not only in the free verse form of his compositions, but in their spirit; he is the unabashed apostle of democracy, an idealist and a revolutionary.

Chicago Poems appeared in 1916, but the poem, Chicago, which introduces the volume, was first printed in the magazine, Poetry, in 1914. It is fairly typical of Sandburg's verse.

"Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:"

Such is the introduction of this Whitman-like composition. More pleasing is the Sketch, which follows; and the description of the fog-bound lake steamer in Lost:

"Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes."

Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920) are the titles of later volumes. One of the best examples of Carl Sandburg's real achievements in free verse is the long composition, Prairie, which stands first in Cornhuskers; it is a vivid and impressive interpretation -- and not devoid of poetry.

"There is a song deep as the fall time redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley."

Books of Reference.

Helpful comment and criticism, together with selections from the works of the free verse poets, will be found in the following books: Some Imagist Poets, Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin); Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin); The New Era in American Poetry, Louis Untermeyer (Holt); New Voices, Marguerite Wilkinson (Macmillan); The New Poetry Anthology, Harriet Monroe and Alice C. Henderson. A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (Houghton Mifflin) is especially recommended as an illuminating discussion of the principles and processes of the poetic art.