TWILIGHT AND MORNING

They laid Him away in a vaulted grave
By a twilight's ashen gloom,

Away from the light of the lilied hills

And the garden's dimming bloom;

But the myrtles bowed their heads and wept,

And the martagons watched (while the soldiers slept) And the olives crowded close and kept

The stone that locked His tomb.

He stepped from the dusk of the rough-hewn grave By the stars of a graying morn;

And he spoke to the weeping muscadine

And His hand caressed the thorn.

Then the hyssop awoke and whispered, "List!" And the grasses the hems of His garments kissed, And the eyes of the sycamine were mist

When the Master said, "Good morn!"

Tendencies in Modern American Poetry*

JULIUS W. PRATT

United States Naval Academy

The most valuable contribution that has yet been made to an understanding of the new movement in poetry is, I think, the volume recently published under the above title. Miss Lowell has made available for the first time biographical material which is most helpful in an interpretation of the work of the six representative poets here treated; she has differentiated clearly the three-principal phases of the new movement; and she has, in two-thirds of the volume, at least, produced some unprejudiced and really helpful criticism. In her frank treatment of Masters and Sandburg, and in her appreciative prefatory references to such moderately conservative poets as Louis Untermeyer and William Rose Benét, she has proved once for all that enthusiasm has not blinded her to the faults of the new or to the excellences of the old.

Of the six poets whom Miss Lowell has selected for treatment-Edward Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, "H. D.," and John Gould Fletcher— two represent each of the three stages in the new development in our poetry. These three stages can best be defined in Miss Lowell's own words:

"All racial changes begin by a disappearance, a slow fading of the fundamental beliefs upon which that particular civilization was reared, but the results of these beliefs still retain their hold upon the people brought up in them. The next step finds the beliefs so much a thing of the past that they have no power to mould character, and the result, for the moment, is a sort of mental chaos, in which cynicism becomes a dominant attitude, in many cases ending in downright despair. The third stage is that in which the change is so complete that it no longer requires to be considered as such at all. The old tradition has passed into the line of history, and departure from it is the rule, not the exception. Men have reared

* Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. By Amy Lowell. New York. The Macmillan Company. $2.50.

new beliefs, are living upon other planes of thought, and that being for the moment settled, they are able to turn their attention to other things, for instance: Beauty.

"In the first stage, beauty is a thing remembered and haunting; in the third stage, it is rediscovered and intoxicating; but in the second, it is crowded out by the stress of travail, by the pangs of a birth which has not yet occurred."

The first stage is represented by Robinson and Frost, the second by Masters and Sandburg, the third by the "Imagists" -"H. D." and John Gould Fletcher.

No one, I think, can well take exception to Miss Lowell's treatment of the first four poets. Her estimate of their powers, and their limitations as well, is that at which every unprejudiced critic has already arrived. It is reassuring to one who, acknowledging and honoring the tremendous power of Master's work, has yet found it unbalanced, cynical, savage, at times indecent, to find in Miss Lowell's volume the following sane and common-sense stricture upon the morbid oversexing of his philosophy: " 'Spoon River' is one long chronicle of rapes, seductions, liaisons, and perversions. It (i. e., this morbid treatment of sex) is the great blot upon Mr. Masters' work. It is an obliquity of vision, a morbidness of mind, which distorts an otherwise remarkable picture."

It is when she approaches that group of poets to which she herself belongs the Imagists-that Miss Lowell's critical faculty succumbs to her personal predilections. The one valuable service she has performed in this section of the book -in addition always to biography and illustrative materialis the pointing out of the Greek affinities of "H. D."-a service which helps immeasurably in understanding the delicate, chaste work of that exquisite artist. But the reader who knows at the end of the chapter just what the Imagists are or stand for will have gained that knowledge from the illustrations, not from Miss Lowell's exposition.

I should like to have space here to take up in detail the six Imagist tenets which Miss Lowell quotes from the preface to the anthology, "Some Imagist Poets." I could show, I believe, that with one exception they are the tenets not of the Imagists alone but of the entire group of poets representing

the new movement. The one exception, the one aim which sets off the Imagists from their fellows, is this: To present an image.

Now the editor of the anthology, and Miss Lowell herself, both protest that the Imagists are "not a school of painters." But, if one may judge from the illustrations of their work here given, that is exactly what they are, in that their whole or chief aim, the one characteristic which differentiates them from the rest, is-by concreteness, by specific wording, by the plentiful employment of color words, but the use of what I may venture to describe as a sort of super-metaphor-to call up a definite, colorful picture to the eye. Take the following, which Miss Lowell calls "one of the most completely successful things that Mr. Fletcher has done:"

The trees, like great jade elephants,

Chained, stamp and shake 'neath the gadflies of the breeze;
The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants:

The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies,

The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shah.

Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of those trees.

That is very beautiful work, no one can deny; but what is it if not picture painting? Remove the visual element, and what is left?

I should like here to call attention to the work of a man who was an Imagist without knowing it, perhaps—a man who preceded Mr. Fletcher in writing color symphonies, as both the title and the workmanship of his "Symphony in Yellow" prove. I mean Oscar Wilde. Suppose we take these two stanzas of Wilde's "Le Panneau," ("The Panel"):

Under the rose-tree's dancing shade

There stands a little ivory girl,

Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl
With pale green nails of polished jade.

The red leaves fall upon the mould,
The white leaves flutter, one by one,
Down to a blue bowl where the sun,
Like a great dragon, writhes in gold.

Now, but for its metrical form and its riming, that is an Imag

ist poem, and if we alter it a bit to read thus:

Purple dancing shade of a rose-tree,
And beneath it

A girl white as ivory.

Polished jade are her pale green nails,

Flicking the pink and pearl rose-leaves.

The red leaves fall

Upon the black mould.

The white leaves flutter down, down

To a blue bowl where,

Like a writhing golden dragon,
The sun glares,—

I maintain that we have essentially the Imagist effect. Miss Lowell asserts that the Imagist rules are those by which the poets of this group "consider the best poetry to be produced." Wilde, with a better sense of proportion, included the above poem in a group called "Fantaisies Décoratives"-"Decorative Whims." The poems of "H. D.", of Mr. Fletcher, of Miss Lowell herself, are immeasurably stronger than these dainty "whims" of Mr. Wilde's, but after all, the aim and the effect are essentially the same. Upon them all, I think, the final verdict will be that they are "decorative whims," very beautiful indeed, but not "the best poetry,"-certainly not the greatest.