CHAPTER XII THE CONTEMPORARY POETS Lo, with the ancient Passion of song. Ever Love fans it, Ever Life feeds it; Time cannot age it, Death cannot slay. William Watson: “England my Mother" We are living in a poetic age. It is a little difficult to grasp this fact until one recalls the status of poetry some twenty years ago. In 1900 the public read little beside fiction; the short story was in its heyday. A volume of verse was something to be printed at the author's expense and read only by the poet's friends. The few poems that were published were, in the main, thin and bookish reechoings of older poets. Poetry had nearly lost its contact with life. Only those writers who cultivated light verse and the French forms were making any real advance. In England twenty years ago there was no younger poet of first importance except Kipling. In America the older New England poets were all dead, and such poets as were writing were not widely read. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Madison Cawein, and William Vaughn Moody did not write the kind of poetry which many persons will ever care to read. Even as recently as 1910, only one of the strictly contemporary American poets had begun to write: this was Edwin Arlington Robinson, then almost entirely unknown. Foreign observers might well imagine that America was too materialistic ever to produce a supremely great poet. We even said the same thing of ourselves. Some shared Macaulay's opinion that “as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines." Today, however, no poet has cause to lament, like Milton, that he is "fallen on evil days," for never before in the history of the world were so many people interested in poetry. The evidence is unmistakable. There are several magazines devoted wholly to poetry. Many of the older publications, which in 1910 used verse only as a "filler," now make it a feature. In recent years both publishers and authors have been known to reap large profits from a volume of verse. Nor is this all. At hundreds of club meetings and popular lectures recent poetry is being read and discussed. Numerous handbooks and anthologies have been published to meet the widespread demand for information in regard to contemporary poets. Most remarkable fact of all perhaps, present-day poetry has at last received recognition in that conservative quarter, the college curriculum. If we except the little community around Boston in the middle of the last century, nothing like this wide interest in poetry has ever been known in America. One of the most striking aspects of contemporary poetry is its re-conquest of much of the territory which verse had lost to prose. When literature emerged from the twilight obscurity of prehistoric times, it consisted solely of poetry; prose was a later development. The Greeks had no Muse for either the novel or the short story. Ever since the invention of printing, prose has encroached more and more upon the narrowing confines of poetry. The novel, the short story, and the essay rendered the epic and the ballad well-nigh obsolete. It began to look as though poetry were to be limited to the lyric. For a decade or more if we except certain brilliant young novelists who have come into prominence within the last two or three years-prose fiction has been conventional and inferior in quality; this is especially true of America. The short story in particular has become stereotyped, machine-made, and out of touch with life. Hence those writers who have stories to tell now frequently turn to poetry as a freer medium of expression. The best of the poems of Noyes and Masefield, of Frost, Robinson, Masters, and Amy Lowell are narrative. We shall discuss the British poets first because they illustrate, better than the American, the transition from the older poetry to the new. In English poetry we find two strongly contrasted groups of poets, who, for want of more exact terms, are usually called the conservatives and the radicals. Among the conservatives we may class William Watson; Robert Bridges, the poet laureate; Alfred Noyes; and three poets no longer living, Stephen Phillips, Andrew Lang, and Austin Dobson. The best known poets of the radical group are John Masefield and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. With them we may class two older poets, Kipling and Yeats, and the younger poets known as the Georgians. The conservative poets, in the main, continue the ideals and methods of the Victorians, especially Swinburne and Tennyson. The radicals rebel against the ideals of the Victorians and seek new themes and experiment with new modes of expression. Tennyson is the pet aversion of the radicals; and Tennyson, though a genuine poet and a great artist, had certain faults which his successors widely imitated. The result was that poetry became highly conventional in language, in ideas, and in technique. Professor Thorndike in a brilliant study of the Victorian period, Literature in a Changing Age, points out the conventional side of Tennyson's diction: "Flowers, moonlight, the lapping wave, jewels and silks, the open road, the wind in the trees, the flash of swords, the pale face and the deep eyes, the rose of dawn, the lone sea mew-whatever is pretty, melodious, picturesque, and rather superfluous in the day's work—furnish the thread of poetic embroidery for Tennyson, and for how many imitators!" Tennyson's followers, being unable to rival his original merits, imitated his faults: his over-ornate diction, his sentimentality, his artificial themes. The subjects of Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, for instance, are drawn oftener from books than from life; their poems presuppose more culture than the average reader possesses. Late Victorian poetry was out of touch with the life of the English people. The time was ripe for a new poetic move common man. ment which should bring poetry back into touch with the Before that could be done, however, it was necessary to abandon the outworn poetic diction and the dead stock ideas of the older poets. Before we take leave of Tennyson, let us point out certain poems by living poets which furnish an excellent basis for a comparison between his work and theirs. In The Daffodil Fields Masefield has told a story which bears a striking resemblance to that of Enoch Arden. The plot of Amy Lowell's "Dried Marjoram" is very similar to that of Tennyson's "Rizpah." In Merlin and Lancelot Edwin Arlington Robinson has tempted comparison with The Idylls of the King. A study of these poems will give the reader an accurate conception of the great changes in poetic language and technique which have come about in the last two or three decades. One discerns the first signs of an approaching change in poetic ideals and methods in Browning, whose versification, diction, and subject matter were more modern than those of any of his Victorian contemporaries. Rudyard Kipling, however, was the first to break completely with the waning Victorian tradition. He employed not the ornate diction of Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris but the simple dialect of the British Tommy. In his Barrackroom Ballads, he wrote, not of Camelot, or Old Japan, or the Earthly Paradise, but of the life he knew at first hand in India. By adopting the simple language and rhythm of the ballad, he managed to write poetry which the average person, indifferent to Swinburne, could readily |