Sandburg's Blue Island Intersection illustrate this characteristic:

"Six street ends come together here.

They feed people and wagons into the center.

In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.
Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.

The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump:
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day." 1

2. The "new poetry" is national and local in its spirit. It does not try to follow the great European traditions. It is interested in the commonplace and the familiar. Admirers of the new poetry are fond of characterizing it by such words as "stark," "unflinching," "indigenous," and "pitiless." For illustrations turn to any anthology of contemporary American verse; for instance, Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry or Monroe and Henderson's The New Poetry. There, under the names of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Ezra Pound, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, and Edwin Arlington Robinson you will find the spirit of America, both national and local, expressed in verseidioms quite different from those of classic European tradition.

3. The "new poetry" discards the conventional rhythmical patterns of traditional poetry. For the regular rhythms of the past it substitutes the irregular rhythms of common speech. It insists that "all poetry is the reproduction of the tones of actual speech." It speaks of "vers libre" or "free line verse," of "cadences," of "organic rhythm,' rather than of "iambics," "pentameters," or "rhyme schemes." Amy Lowell's Madonna of the Evening Flowers is a striking example of these unconventional rhythms:

1 Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company.

"All day long I have been working,

Now I am tired.

I call: 'Where are you?'

But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,

The sun shines in on your books,

On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.

Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?

I go about searching.

Then I see you,

Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,

With a basket of roses on your arm.

You are cool, like silver,

And you smile.

I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes,
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,

That the columbines have overrun all bounds,

That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.

You tell me these things.

But I look at you, heart of silver,

White heart-flame of polished silver,

Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,

And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,

While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of
the Canterbury Bells." 1

4. The "new poetry" is hard and clear, definite and concrete, free from vagueness and moralizing, from artificiality and sentimentality of emotion and expression. These qualities are illustrated in the following description from Robert Frost's Birches:

"Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves

1 Reprinted by permission of and by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust-

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun." 1

This freedom from sentimentality can be seen in Edwin Arlington Robinson's Richard Cory:

"Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good morning,' and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head." 2

Even these definite claims, however, do not define a type of lyrical poetry; they merely characterize certain contem

1 Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.

2 Reprinted by permission of the author and of Charles Scribner's Sons.

porary poems. What is true of all other forms of English literature is true also of poetry: it has lost the old restraints of form, it is free and experimental. Every writer creates his own type.

The future of the forms of English literature no one can predict. For a long time the present flexibility and freedom will probably continue. Then may come a day when writers will say with Wordsworth:

"Me this uncharter'd freedom tires;

I feel the weight of chance-desires;"

and may once more choose to work out their ideas within the limits of traditional art.

CHAPTER III

POETRY

WHY PEOPLE READ POETRY

Why do people read poetry? In the first place, poetry gives us the pleasure of recognition. That is, in a way, a proof that it is widely read. We all flush Poetry affords with involuntary pleasure when we hear opportunity for an allusion to Joyce Kilmer's Trees or to recognition Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous with Death, because we know about them.

pleasurable

But the feeling of pleasurable recognition is only a minor reason for our enjoyment of poetry. When Poetry gives we read in a novel that the heroine, as she looked out into the moonlit winter night,

quoted softly to herself:

"Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon;

My breath to heaven like vapor goes;
May my soul follow soon!"

pleasure by appealing to the imagination

it does give us pleasure if we recognize the poem; but it gives us pleasure even if we do not. The reason is not far to seek. It is because poetry stimulates the imagination. It enables us to see in our imagination the beauty of the snow "sparkling to the moon" and to feel the cold stillness of the winter night. It recreates for us the beauty of "October's bright blue weather"