New-York tribune., 1921-03-20
BY Malcolm Cowley

BREAKERS AND GRANITE. BY John
Gould Fletcher. Published by the Mac
milan Company.
" REAKERS AND GRANITE is the
- record Of John Gould Fletch-
~ er's journeys across this con-
tinent; one might almost call
it guide book in free verse to these
| United States.
The volume opens when the vessel
that bears him is towed through New
York harbor. He describes Manhattan,
New England; Chicago; not in terms
of the roughneck rhapsodies of Carl
Sandburg or OF the fatulent "inter-
pretations" of Young Georgian novel
lists on q lecture tour, but with sort
of hard and cruel beauty that one
has not been taught to expect from
American poets. He travels down the
Mississippi into the Old South, then
westward into Arizona.
His journeying, indeed, is not only
through space, but through time; he
goes back to the slaughter of the buff
falo, to the Civil War, to the age of
clipper ships. To say that his sub
ject is tremendous is fiat and obvi-
Gus statement. Especially it is gigan-
tcsque theme for Mr.. Fletcher, who
has expressed himself frequently
heretofore, in mediums as brief and
delicate as the hokku.
Breakers and Granite, in other words,
is an attempt at something approaching
infnity, and there is question
whether the attempt is we'll advised.
There is limit to the bigness Of the
impression which any one book can
convey. Take Romain ROLAND, for ex-
ample. He tried to explain the artis-
! tic consciousness completely in one
huge novel, and yet what one reinem-
bers out of Christophe is not the
general effect, but the beauty of some
of the disconnected passages. Bar
busse, who attempted in one volume
to create a general impression Of
war, succeeds only in creating a few
vivid sketches of it's incidents. And
so with Fletcher. Inasmuch as his
volume makes this attempt at bigness,
inasmuch as it tries to be the atlas
and epitOme of a nation, the Great
Am erican Novel in verse, it is prac-
tically foredoomed to failure. The in
dividual poems have beauty and vital
ity, but not the general conception of
the volume. The America he describes
is not unified organism; it is another
case where the sum of the parts is
greater than the whole
1t is among these parts, then, that
one must look for the excellences of
the volume He photographs the con-
tinent from strange angles and ele-
yations. For example, he says of the
land along which Hendrix Hudson
coasted that it was "a continent of
forests, out of which twelve great
rivers = Merrimac, Connecticut, Hud-
son, Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac,
James, Roanoke, Peedee and Santee,
Savannah and Altamaha- and pour
their waters into the ocean, Out OF
his Impressions of Manhattan he
chooses such random pictures as that
of an old Jewish cemetery or of the
gewgawed lawns of an inn overlooking
the Hudson; in other words, he knows
his city we'll enough to go beyond the
conventional and expected pmans to the
skyscrapers. He finds in New England
a symbolic expression of the struggle
of the whole nation--it is the combat
between the breakers and the granite
boulders Of the shore; between the
disintegrating forces and those solid
qualities OF the nation which remain
and withstand. 1t is from this CON
flict that be has taken the name of the
volume.
Mr.. Fletcher is peculiarly qualified
for these unusual pictures OF portions
of our continent because he is an
American who has spent large por-
ticn of his life abroad. He thus is
able to combine the perspective of the
foreigner with the familiarity of the
native. In his description of voyage
down the Mississippi this combination
shows to unusually good effect; he is
able to lend distance and a pleasing
exoticism to description OF his owa
landsomethiug which fey poets have
been abs to eshisye. ghsrs il tas