Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1889-02-22
:" h' HOWELLs PRAISES AMrn1c.x
POETS

k>UESIS.
w many books diverse have come to tho
s.uoy lately that department much
u.oie obstinate than this in its impress
sio''s might we'll question whether it
va" va not mistaken in ever supposing de-
'l'ne OF poetry among us. Quantitatively
=. !east' We do not think the Study could
MAINTAIN that opinion, and qualitatively
'nere is a chance that possibly the Study
nay nave been wrong, though that is
great deal to say. What is certain is
mat IN these books, quite fortuitous in
thelr arrival and desultory in their
range, there is the presence more and
more OF what seems the color of an au-
thentlc life; or, if we may not quite say
this, then there is the increasing absence
OF reflected life. We have before now
spoken of the gradual silencing in the
MINOR poets of the echoes from the great
modern masters; and though this hush
means the extinction of the voices that
woke the echoes, it means something
more than that too. Perhaps while they
sounded at their grandest, it was not
possible for any lesser note to lift itself
except in time with them; perhaps an
interval of suspense in what has long
seemed the highest poetry was necessary
to the facultation of any new utterance.
At its lowest the ebb is prophecy of
the flood, and the rising tide is the next
thing in order, unless the moon forget
her Office upon the seas and the sensi-
bilities.
The reader is not to imagine, however,
that the tide is coming back with the
tabled rush Of its refux on Labradoran
coasts; there will be time enough ap-
parently for every one who dislikes
poetry to get out of the way before it
touches high-water mark. But the fact
remains that there seems really stir
again in forms supposed nearly lifeless,
and that the impulse is from within
rather than from without.
1t must always be surprise to the
critic Eutured in the times Of the great
poets now quiet or quiescent not to find
their influence in every young poet he
takes up; but this is the surprise, not
to say disappointment, we have suffered
in the new books of verse before u.s. It
is impossible not to name Tennysen
here, and one hardly feels contemporary
with there poets who have not only not
tried to write like him with all that
sweet inconsistencies of imitation once
SO delightfully."- obvious), but who are ap.
parently insensible if not ignorant of
him. We do not find his mental atti-
tudes in them, nor his turns of phrase /;
nor his pet words; it is all very strange !;
it is like another country, another Ian
guage, another world; we are little lost
in it. He is even more extinct in them
than Dickens, his only compeer as an
influence, is in our fiction; for one still
comes upon traces of that master now
and then in apprentices of the art. It
would be extremely interesting, if one
could do it, to follow the decline of such
a literary domination, and mark the
moment of its final lapse; but the in
quiry would be pos sible only to German
thoroughness and German patience.
Our airier criticism may yet make this
sort of research its Office; but in the
mean time it can now only recognize
the accomplished fact, and another fact
equally important, that there is no re-
version to still earlier types in the new
writer's who have cast off this influence.
The poets who do not sing like Tenny-
son do not sing like Byron either, nor
like Keats, nor Shelley, nor Words
worth.-Harpe,'s Magazine.