The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-07-06
(An address delivered before the sum mer school of the University or

Alahama.)
 The title, "Modern American Poetry, may convey to some of you an apparent Is there such creature as modern American poetry? Some hold that poetry, by it's very definition. is verse written by a man or women who has been dead fifty years. Poetry ended with Tennyson and the Brownings, with Longfellow and Lowell. and Lanier. To those who regard art, and literature, and poetry as dead things-as musty museums of antiquity, there can be no modern American poetry. But there are those who see these as busy factories in opera tion, who see poetry a river, now wid- ening to a ShakeSpearean, victorian, or a Woodrovian age; now narrowing to the thin trickle of the barren years between, but always flowing in, like Tennyson brook, political speech.
 To those who see poetry as dynamls, ana not statis-as live, and not dead-a sur vey of America's poetic past IS not too
 encouraging Only three figures rise above the foothills of mediocrity into clouds of permanent glory and of these three we are proud that two are south
 erners Walt Whitman, greatest of them all was a son of that Manhattan ne
 loved to sing. But his vision stretched
 from the gulf to the lakes, from the se-
 quoia of the Sierra Nevada to the gnaried
 frs of Maine Great in himself, he IS
 greater as the gateway to the poetry or
 today He can be more prosy than
 Wordsworth-and that is saying great deal. he can be as ponderously clown
 ish as Browning is at times-but like
 them he can mount to white eXaltation
 given to few men. He is the llperator or
 the poets of today, in spirit as in tech niuue; and the critics, who crowned hlm yesterday with thorns, crown him today with the laurel
 Next to Whitman comes Poe, a south erner. by many classed as the greatest
 American poet even as he is in realty
 the least American of our poets. HIS
 morbid genius. 'most musicaiy most
 melancholy" is more continental than
 Anglo-Saxon; yet like his own Israel, ms heartstrings were a lute. Last came Sid- nev Lanier an innovator in technique as
 Whitman was. a son of a larger music
 than Poe, and singer whose ample
 beauty is just gaining fit recognition from
 the critics.t3
 With these the tale is done The es-
 timable New England school, Longfeilow
 Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, even transcen-
 dental Emerson, and the author or
 ''Thanatopsis," rarely touched poetry or
 the first rank They were provincial, in
 the worst sense idolators of English GUS
 toms, diluted imitators of English verse especially Tennyson sand Tennyson came, by Keats, from Shakespeare-the rude reality of America could not speak in their courteous strophes. They wrote didactic, moralizing, teachy- -preachy verse they were the muses looking through
 blue spectacles. How could they Know creative poetry? They were popular, yes just as East Lynn Harold Bell Wright, the Katzenjammer Kids, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Charlie Chaplin are popular. But in the main their ears were dear, ana their voices dumb to pure poetry.
 Then came barren stretch. broken by thin flashes of song from Richard Hovey, Bliss Carman, William Vaughn MOODY and the lone call of Edwin Markham s Man with the Hoe" This tapered about twenty years ago. into comparative silence.
 Eight years ago a young recorder or police judge in Birmingham took a rev minutes between cases to work on the manuscripts of poems he slid into ms desk, as the next defendant sidled before him. mumbling his ''gultyn or mot guilty. VT ronner." The urge grew stronger; and seven years ago this young ex-recorder left Birmingham for New York, where he continued at his poetry trying to let the land and the time and the people speak through his verses | Seven years ago. again, a successful put I dsllusioned lawyer in Chicago, Edgar | Lee Masters, began to publish his spoon River Anthology" in weekly installments. Seven years ago sandyhaired aesthetic l tramp of Springfield H., with face ike l a placid mid-western grocers, produced "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" and added the name Of Vachei Lindsay to the roster of the arriving poets Seven years ago tired New Eng 1 lander, who had peddled his poems Tn vira tf,tr tr,t1h sides of the Atlantic. found London Publisher who ventured to bring out his | North of Boston," and in the person | of Robert Frost, one of the great voices | of today was recognized. Seven years ago the amiable Nure of Miss Amy Lowell. a poet of great weight, the most
 all all-round poet in America. waddled
 into view smoking big black cigar. and
 her brother president of Harvard Uni yersity! After her tumbled and cavorted, iazzed and shimmied. the maglstS, the | s.others" group. and motley flocK or 1 the Pecan" or nut school of poetry. When left for New York I had never heard of masters, or Lindsay. or Amy | Lowell. or Robert Frost. They had not heard of Masters or Lindsay, or Amy the same moment. as if at the, signal oi | some vast orchestra leader. their music l was lifted: the violins began twittering l the 'cellos grumbling, the trcmpets par | ing and swelling-and the continent nao found tongue, chorus of tongues, te sneak for 1.-the great, dumb heart of the l people. and the stumbling age, had founo l their voices. Since then the chorus has growi stronger instead of weaker We have hac time to get our bearings, and to see wha | promises permanence and what does not
 If you wish to know American poetry of today, turn first to Edwin Arlingtor
 Robinson. who has been writing in hi' own perfect and polished style for twenty years. His Man Against the sky, hi'
 Merlin" immeasurably superior to th' Tennysonian version, are nisn-wa.e'
 r,arks of our poetic renascence. Hi. l"I.ancelot," another volume poem. wa. | published this year; and was especial,
 L. 4..astiru to me hecaIlSe the three .4vris