# Trails Sunward

TRAILS SUNWARD
TRAILS SUNWARD
BY
CALE YOUNG RICE
AUTHOR OF "EARTH AND NEW EARTH," "COLLECTED PLAYS AND POEMS," ETC.
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1917
Copyright, 1917, by The Century Co.
Published, March, 1917
PREFACE
Never has poetry tried so hard to be prose as at the present time in America. Weary of being banned to the limbo of the inconspicuous, it has adopted, via Paris, some illegitimate offspring of Whitman's ideas, and thus "ismed" and calling itself the "new poetry," it whacks all that has hitherto been held as making for the poetic.
To the experienced these new "isms" are but aspects of a general and unrestrained reaction toward realism. Even in form this is so. Their broken prose rhythms, suitable perhaps to the unaccented French tongue, but lacking the deep music of such true free verse as Whitman has immortalized, makes us aware of the fact that "free verse realism" is the name which is perhaps most appropriate to them all.
​Yet the purpose of these realists, when it has been sincere, has been useful: for every poet of experience knows that he must constantly revert to free verse and realism in order to avoid tightness of technique or academicism. When, however, they have been insincere, when they have been aware of palming off broken prose, or when their impulse has been merely symptomatic of a desire to do something new, startling, or "American," in order to keep their heads above the flood of books poured in from abroad, the result has been deplorable.
For a wave of interest in poetry, such as a dozen years of achievement has brought into existence at the present time, can easily be dissipated. No poetic public will long give attention to a realism which makes the mistake, common to all shallow realism, of neglecting passion, imagination, charm and nearly all the permanent qualities of any true poetry. "Prose syntax" and "natural speech" are good—and many of us, remembering Wordsworth, have never forgotten to use them. But in ​the hands of these realists they become strangely self-conscious and artificial.
Nor can the criticism of these realists, each of whom writes up the other's work from some point of vantage in various newspapers or magazines, prove less deleterious. For one of the troubles with poetry in America is that it is too often reviewed by poets—who cannot in one case out of a hundred be trusted with that task.
Neither this excessive realism nor the exploitation of it will suffice to relieve our situation. Our difficulties are deeper. We must have a truer and greater freedom than can be given by any change of verse form. We must exact a profounder grasp of life than any rude externalism permits. We must ask a finer sincerity than that to fact. In truth the solution for us lies in a thorough absorption of all great art values, and in a maturer and less restless living of our poetic life generally.
Cale Young Rice.
Louisville, Ky.
CONTENTS
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1943, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 80 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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