Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Mr. Monro is so stern in his idealism that, although a poet of originality and feeling, he willingly minimizes his own production for the sake of advancing poetry “en masse.” That is remarkable, and his enterprise deserves all the success which the poets and the general public can give it.

America, 1915

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

From the sea coast, from the bleak ravines of the hills that lift their escarpments towards the sky that pours down pitiless threads of sunlight, whirls over chill, clinging tentacles of rain, smashes hard buffets of huge wind, sifts fine, quivering drifts of snow, thrashes with thunder and with hail, uncurls its great sodden, flapping curtains before the gale—from the marshlands, from the banks of slow rivers, from the still brown plateaus, from the midst of steaming valleys, from the wide bays ringed with peaks, a thousand cities reek into the sky. Through a million vents the smell of cookery overflows. It rises upward day and night in strange, tragic black rows of columns that glow and make the stars quiver and dance and darken the sunlight.

Green rivers of corn, golden seas of wheat, white lakes of cotton meet and fuse and inter-cross. Cattle string across in frightened procession: multitudes on multitudes of horses, black, dun, grey, gallop away after them, jarring the earth with their hoofs, beating up dust in heavy, fluffy masses. Far away the sun lies still over broad patches of silence, sparsely green, where an eagle hovers, or an antelope starts up, or a sly, half-starving coyote is seen. The sun looks into yellow castles wedged in the cliff that were old when the first explorers saw them, and on white bulging palaces tinselled with marble and gold. The sun sees engines that rattle and cough, black derricks that wave their arms in arcs aloft, crazy log cabins that topple into the marsh. On every side are symbols of man’s desire, made with his hands, hurried, glorious, sordid, tragic, clashing, insane; the sun looks and does not understand but pours over them its heat and cold, and rain and light, and lightning, always the same.

Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving. The wheels bound and groan and roar and waver and snap—and go on as before. Between the cities, over plain and hill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles leaving great trails of smoke amid the wheat, the cattle, the corn, the cotton, the sordid, hideous factory shafts, the fleet masses of plunging and galloping stallions. Their forces are never spent or tired, for, nervously above them, earth is laced and wired with crackling, chattering, singing, whispering electricity. They fly from city to city, and the sky is scribbled above them with childish grey gigantic scrawls, amid which the sun wabbles and crawls. And over all shoot backward and forward words that walk in air, and perhaps not long will the upper spaces be still, but soon be filled with racing lines of strong black bird-machines bearing men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal, and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack. Red, and black and yellow, the earth takes on its coat of colors, from the struggle of a hundred million hands. It is a palimpsest which no one reads or understands, which none has time to heed, a loom-frame woven over with interspersed and tangled threads of which the meaning is lost, from which the pattern hangs in shreds.

Amid all this, men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter, scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy masses, out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen blocks of steel or marble; they saunter in some forgotten place; they yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow, pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of dripping forests mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their pains. Grey, hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then, as if in mockery, some coppery tower that seems as if it would split its sky with its majesty. They are in a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some giant’s body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creaks through them, pouring out its breath through the chimneys, scattering itself over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great, vague, inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And ever the sky pours on it heat and rain, and wind, and light, and lightning, and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake and take its place in the world.

But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears; it seems to swell from out the earth; it bulges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches, holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer-blows that split the core of earth asunder—the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher, covering the sea with its tumult, and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals on earth’s breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not, nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.

The centuries sit with hands on their knees, wearing on weary foreheads their iron-crowned destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn; but the being—the thing that will master all the ages—still hesitates to be born. The great derricks, black and frozen, lift their arms in mid air; the locomotives hoot and mutter in despair; the shuttles clatter and clamor and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls, while without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding, in the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will not arrive. Still it refuses at the very gates of life. America—America—blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth!

Poems

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

Silence

The wordless dream of the fire;
The white clock dropping gray minutes from its placid lips;
The breathing of women, like the birth of little winds;
The muttering of the man in the next room, painting a landscape;
I threw them together with a jerk of my soul-wrist,
And had silence—a swaying sound
Made of the death of the others.

A Head

Her head was a morning in April.
Loose, livid mist arose from cold ground
And revealed two tired shepherds with lanterns,
Standing above the wrinkled red blankets they had lain on...
Then came the morning light—her smile.

The Operation

With eyes of radium, and beard the color of wet sand,
The doctor unlocked his instrument case as carelessly
As a child opens an old box of blocks,
And almost silently whistled something out of “Aida.”
And the nurses—bits of sky with thick clouds—
Chattered about patients and hummed frayed songs.
But when the still body on the little cart came,
The lips of the doctor became stiff and trim
(Bows of ribbon turning to circles of stone)
And the nurses were no longer women:
Were sexless, with tapering fingers and metal eyes...
The doctor made the incision and checked the blood:
And I thought of a miner, half-reverently, half-wearily cutting soft
earth,
Picking out lumps of dead silver...
But the picture changed when the doctor sewed up the wound,
And I saw a middle-aged woman gravely mending a limp rag...
The little cart disappeared,
And the doctor locked his instrument case as carelessly
As a child closes an old box of blocks:
And the nurses were once more bits of sky with thick clouds.

Some Imagist Poets

GEORGE LANE

Some months ago, in these pages, Mr. Witter Bynner pointed out that “Imagism” was derived from a Japanese poetical form, the name of which Mr. Bynner regretted that he had forgotten. This name is “Hokku,” and undoubtedly the Japanese Hokku poetry was the model upon which much of the work in the first Imagist Anthology was formed, notably the contributions of Mr. Ezra Pound. There was Greek influence, too, in that first collection. But the whole volume showed a remarkable desire towards perfection and clarity of utterance, and a delicate perception of beauty.

There were few poetry lovers who did not taste its fine, astringent flavour, but its qualities were at once its faults. It was beautiful work, but too tenuous ever to become a great art, said the objectors. It was incapable of embracing many of the elements of life and poetry. The Imagists must remain side-tracked, and therefore, clever though they were, they could not be of real importance.

But it seems that Imagism was more virile, more capable of growth, than was supposed. The jejune maledictions and assertions of their chief spokesman, Mr. Pound, have done so much to make the group ridiculous that it is with a feeling of surprise that we find this volume a great advance upon its predecessor.

Here is the work of six poets, four of whom were represented in the first anthology. In an interesting preface they state their poetical theories, which are much the same as those printed so often in _Poetry_. But here the tenets are soberly and sensibly presented, and the whole preface is dignified and worthy of consideration. Clearly the Imagists are growing up.

It is hardly necessary to rehearse here the Imagist creed. It has been discussed, with more or less hostility, in many reviews. But certainly, in reading this preface, the hostility suddenly vanishes, and the reviewer finds himself wondering if perhaps, after all, this movement is not one of most unusual significance.

Briefly, these poets call themselves Imagists because their object is to present an “image”; they believe “that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous”; they desire “to use the language of common speech,” and “to employ always the _exact_ word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.” They wish “to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite”; and, finally, they are convinced that “concentration is of the very essence of poetry.”

Brave words, excellent aims and hard enough of attainment. Again, these poets agree to allow absolute freedom of subject, and, with a little dig at some of their contemporaries, they say, “It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.”

That is a wholesome point of view, but indeed the Imagists have hardly erred on the side of too great a preoccupation with modern life. In fact this volume is noteworthy as showing a more personal, a less literary, outlook on life.

The first Imagist Anthology contained the work of ten poets. Some were represented by a number of poems, some by only one. In this new volume only four of those poets are represented. But what is remarkable is that they are not all the one poem authors. On the contrary, Richard Aldington and H. D. had more poems in the first anthology than anyone else in the volume, yet here are Richard Aldington and H. D. subscribing to an arrangement which gives each poet approximately the same amount of space. “Also,” says the preface, “to avoid any appearance of precedence, they (the poets included) have been put in alphabetical order.” So art is to come before self-advertisement. Happy omen! With such ideals the group should go far. Six young poets with so much talent, devotion, and singleness of purpose, is a phenomenon to be noticed.

Perhaps this is the key to the “differences of taste and judgment” which have divorced these poets from the others of the first anthology. They go on to say that “growing tendencies are forcing them along different paths.” We can only guess at the tendencies, as the poems in this book show them, and it is not our business to probe farther into a schism which is touched upon so lightly and quietly in this admirable preface.

The six poets of this little anthology are: Richard Aldington, H. D., John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. It is quite easy to see why “mutual artistic sympathy” binds these young people together. But how extraordinarily individual they are, just the same! From the exquisite, gem-like poems of H. D., to the organ music of Amy Lowell in _The Bombardment_, with the graceful, tender, often humorous work of Richard Aldington and the tragic earnestness of D. H. Lawrence, set off by the rich imagination of John Gould Fletcher, and the poetic realism, touched with a charming intimateness, of F. S. Flint.

Richard Aldington’s contributions begin with _Childhood_, a study of a lonely little boy in a horribly dull English town. It is full of wistfulness, for the little boy is very real, and the detail is admirably managed. The little boy is shut up in the ugly town, like a chrysalis in a matchbox:

I hate that town; ...
There were always clouds, smoke, rain
In that dingy little valley.
It rained; it always rained.
I think I never saw the sun until I was nine—
And then it was too late;
Everything’s too late after the first seven years.

That is very vivid. So, too, is the description of the contents of the large tin box in the attic. But Mr. Aldington never allows the descriptions to usurp the poem; he keeps them properly subordinated to his theme, the loneliness of the child.

Fine as this poem is, it seems more experimental than Mr. Aldington’s shorter work. Long poems require a different technique from short poems, and perhaps Mr. Aldington has not yet become quite master of it. It is in the short poems that he is so eminently successful.

_The Poplar_ is an almost perfect poem of its kind. A complete “image,” and with that fine, poetic imagination which is the hall-mark of Mr. Aldington’s best work. What could be more beautiful than this:

I know that the white wind loves you,
Is always kissing you and turning up
The white lining of your green petticoat.
The sky darts through you like blue rain,
And the grey rain drips on your flanks
And loves you.
And I have seen the moon
Slip his silver penny into your pocket
As you straightened your hair;
And the white mist curling and hesitating
Like a bashful lover about your knees.

_The Poplar_ is, on the whole, the best poem of Mr. Aldington’s in the book, but _The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time_ runs it close. And here we have that divine gift of poetical humor which is another of Mr. Aldington’s rare qualities. Space alone prevents me from quoting it. But if I put these two first, where shall I put _Round-Pond_, with its sun “shining upon the water like a scattering of gold crocus-petals”?

Mr. Aldington has advanced in his art. In spite of the _Faun_ and _Lemures_, he has sloughed off much of the Greek mannerism which marred his work in the first anthology. The training which his Greek studies have given him, is here put to excellent and individual use. One looks for much from him in the future.

H. D.’s poems are undoubtedly the most perfect in the book. There is nothing broad, nothing varied about her attempts, but what she tries for she succeeds in doing, absolutely. But in her work, too, we find a grateful change going on. The stage properties are no longer exclusively Greek. In fact, only one poem of her seven has anything obviously Greek about it. There is nothing specifically inartistic in this transplanting of the imagery of another place and time into one’s work. But when an English poet fills every poem full of Greek names and Greek devices, the result is intense weariness on the part of the reader. The poems may be beautiful, but this foreign flavour gives them a sort of chilling quality. One cannot help feeling that the poet is straining after a poetical effect, and that stands in the way of a complete sympathy between poet and reader.

H. D. is too much of an artist not to have realized this, and in these new poems (with the exception I have mentioned), there is no hint of direct preoccupation with the Greek in title or text. Yet the poems are so completely Greek that they might be translations from some newly-discovered papyrus. And still, in reading them, one feels that the sincerity of the artist is not to be questioned. Here is no striving after effect, but a complete saturation of a personality in a past mode. If one believed in reincarnations, one could say, and be certain, that H. D. was the reincarnation of some dead Greek singer. The Greek habit sits upon her as easily as a dress, loosened by constant wear. It is undubitably hers. To adopt another speech would be an unpardonable artificiality. Realizing this, and not making the mistake that so many reviewers have done in considering her a copyist, we must admit that H. D.’s poems attain a perfection which is not to be found in the work of any other modern poet. This garland of sea flowers is a masterpiece of pure beauty. I have only space to quote one of these poems, but it shall be quoted entire.

Sea Iris

Weed, moss-weed
root tangled in sand,
sea iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow
like a thin twig.

Fortunate one,
scented and stinging,
rigid myrrh-bud,
camphor-flower,
sweet and salt—you are wind
in our nostrils.

II.

Do the murex-fishers
drench you as they pass?
Do your roots drag up colour
from the sand?
Have they slipped gold under you;
rivets of gold?

Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.

H. D. has her limitations, as I said before. They are the most obvious thing about her, except her perfection. But it is so ridiculous to cavil at them, as it would be to deny the loveliness of one of the sea flowers she writes about, because it is not a forest of lofty trees.

To pass from H. D. to Mr. John Gould Fletcher is something in the nature of a shock. It is a good deal like plunging into the ocean from a warm, sunny cliff. One’s ears, and nose, and mouth, are filled with rushing water. One feels in the grasp of an overwhelming power, and one struggles to the surface, breathless, half-drowned, but wholly invigorated.

To drop the figure, these two poems of Mr. Fletcher’s are so full of potentialities, so large in suggestion, that one hardly knows what to say about them. Does _The Blue Symphony_ mean life? I confess I do not know. Is it merely a series of pictures? No, there is a vague undercurrent to the poem which makes that impossible. It is the sort of poem which a mystic might ponder over indefinitely and find new meanings every hour. And yet it is all done with the precision and clearness of the Imagist theory.

It is impossible to give any idea of the poem as a whole by quoting bits of it. But little pieces, even divorced from their context, have that succinct epigrammatic quality which is the stamp of genius. Here are three lines:

I have heard and have seen
All the news that has been:
Autumn’s gold and Spring’s green!

It is evident in this poem that Mr. Fletcher has been much influenced by the Japanese.

And now the lowest pine-branch
Is drawn across the disk of the sun.

is absolutely Japanese. But strangely enough it is a technique got from a study of Japanese painting rather than from Japanese poetry.

Mr. Fletcher’s versatility is shown by turning from _The Blue Symphony_, to his other poem, _London Excursion_. Here the note of mysticism of _The Blue Symphony_ is entirely abandoned, and there is no hint of Japanese influence. If _London Excursion_ follows any lead, it is the lead of the new schools of poetry and painting in France. But I will not insult Mr. Fletcher by suggesting that he is, in any way, a disciple of Marinetti and the Futurists. It is nearer the truth to say that he has realized the vividness of some of their methods, and modified them to his own use.

_London Excursion_ is one of the most interesting poems in this volume. It is a poem of a man going into London in the morning by ’bus, spending the day walking about the streets and going into shops, and coming home at night by train. It sounds simple, but it is really the most amazing expression of light, color, and unrelated impressions that one can conceive. This is his impression of a street from his ’bus-top:

Black shapes bending,
Taxicabs crush in the crowd.

The tops are each a shining square
Shuttles that steadily press through wooly fabric
Drooping blossom,
Gas-standards over
Spray out jingling tumult
Of white-hot rays.

Monotonous domes of bowler-hats
Vibrate in the heat.
Silently, easily we sway through braying traffic,
Down the crowded street.
The tumult crouches over us,
Or suddenly drifts to one side.

Mr. Flint’s work is always delightful. He has a winning way of taking his reader into his confidence. This, and his love of nature, which he paints with real affection, gains our sympathy at once. It must be admitted that none of Mr. Flint’s seven poems quite equal two of his in the first anthology, _London My Beautiful_ and _The Swan_. One feels in these two poems a groping quality, as though the poet were not quite satisfied with them himself. As though the first _élan_ with which he adopted the _vers libre_ medium were passing away, and he were beginning to realize that the form has its limitations.

If there is any truth in this, it is evident, however, that Mr. Flint has not yet made up his mind to try anything else. It would be almost a pity if he did, for few _vers librists_ understand the manipulation of cadence as he does. Perhaps the following is the one of these poems which has most of his characteristic charm:

Lunch

Frail beauty,
green, gold and incandescent whiteness,
narcissi, daffodils,
you have brought me Spring and longing,
wistfulness,
in your irradiance.

Therefore, I sit here
among the people,
dreaming,
and my heart aches
with all the hawthorn blossom,
the bees humming,
the light wind upon the poplars,
and your warmth and your love
and your eyes ...
they smile and know me.

_Malady_ strikes a stronger note than anything of Mr. Flint’s that I have read before. It is excellent psychology, and steadily, astringently done.

It is this constant change and growth which makes the progress of this little group so interesting to watch. Mr. Flint’s work in the first anthology seemed quite successful and finished. He had done what he had done excellently, and he would go on doing it to the end of the chapter. But here we see Mr. Flint, dissatisfied with mere success, daring a wider horizon. From the point of view of adequacy of technique, his poems suffer, as is natural; but the technique is sure to follow the widened thought, before long. _Malady_ and the poem called _Fragment_ show the direction in which Mr. Flint is moving. His next work will be interesting to see.

Mr. D. H. Lawrence is the best known of the poets in this book, although a newcomer to the anthology. No modern writer is more vigorous than he, and none is more entirely, almost brutally sincere. In Mr. Lawrence’s novels this brutality is sometimes excessively evident, but always one feels that the author inflicts pain upon himself as well as his readers; that he says what he sees and is concerned not to shirk and be a coward for his own comfort.

In his poetry, Mr. Lawrence seems to be more lenient with himself. It is as though he allowed the moralist in him a day out. Not that he ever ceases to be a moralist, really. But he permits himself to lay a slight covering over the stark nakedness of disagreeable facts. This covering is poetry, and very beautiful and original poetry it is.

Green

The sky was apple-green
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green
They show, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.

Mr. Lawrence has solved the problem of _vers libre_ for himself, by writing in a rhymed metre which usually defies all scansion, but which gives a queer, and most satisfactory effect, of elasticity and strength. For this reason, and for its novelty, Mr. Lawrence’s manner is very interesting, but his matter is still more so. Read _The Mowers_, a common tragedy, but put so newly and strikingly that it comes upon one with all its original force.

_Fireflies in the Corn_ and _A Woman to Her Dead Husband_ are new in subject as well as in presentation, and they have a bald reality about them which I have never met in any other poem. But never once does Mr. Lawrence make the mistake of being only a realist; he never ceases to be a poet. In _Fireflies in the Corn_ there are these lines:

And those bright fireflies wafting in between
And over the swaying cornstalks, just above
And all their dark-feathered helmets, like little green
Stars, come low and wandering here for love
Of this dark earth.

The _Ballad of Another Ophelia_ is probably his best poem. In it we see his peculiar style at its very best.

Mr. Lawrence is the singer of truth, the lover of humanity. His inclusion into the Imagist group shows that the school is broad and real enough not to desire to shut itself up in the cupboard of precocity, as in the beginning there was some fear of its doing.

Where Mr. Lawrence gives us the broadest view of Imagism from an English standpoint that this newer, more vital group has offered us, Miss Lowell does the same service for the American side. The qualities that make her work noteworthy are first, a virtuoso command of language that fits itself to the most diverse themes, and second, a sort of fantastic, curious irony that is essentially American. This irony is perhaps at its finest in _The Traveling Bear_ and _The Letter_, but these are too long to quote. I choose instead _Bullion_, which may be taken for a very modern type of love poem, in which love itself becomes a burden:

My thoughts
Chink against my ribs
And roll about like silver hail-stones.
I should like to spill them out,
And pour them, all shining,
Over you.
But my heart is shut upon them
And holds them straitly.

Come, You! and open my heart;
That my thoughts torment me no longer,
But glitter in your hair.

Miss Lowell always looks at things from an angle. Her mind reflects the unusual aspect and that most vividly. As she says of herself:

When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
My mind begins to peek and peer.
It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens,
And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples,
Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.
It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,
And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.
How light and laughing my mind is,
When all the good folk have put out their bed-room candles,
And the city is still!

Miss Lowell has the ability which is rare among present-day poets of recognizing that beauty does not belong to an epoch or a period, but is always the same, under whatever strange form it may present itself.

Doubtless her most remarkable poem is that called _The Bombardment_. Whether the technique adopted here by Miss Lowell is destined to work a revolution in verse-writing remains for the future to settle. But here, at least, it perfectly justifies itself. No one should permit, however, a question of technique to obscure the deep tragedy, the splendid humanity, of this poem. War has only one beauty: that of its terrible destructiveness of all beauty. _The Bombardment_ is the best statement of this aspect of war I know. It must be read in its entirety, and so I will not attempt piecemeal quotation of this most fitting conclusion to the volume.

This book is so provocative of thought, the poets in it are so suggestive, each one by him—or herself, that each really requires a separate review. But I have said enough to show what an important volume this little book is. We are told that it is to be an annual, and certainly we shall watch its succeeding appearances with great interest.

It is certainly best to separate an artist so far from his work
as not to take him as seriously as his work.—_Nietzsche._

Editorials and Announcements

_The Murder of a Poet_

It is reported that Rupert Brooke died of sun-stroke last month in the Dardanelles. There is nothing to be said in the face of such monster horrors.... And it is also reported that Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson has burned up his production of Shaw’s _Caesar and Cleopatra_, not being able to bear the strain of acting in a play written by his unpatriotic countryman who protested against such horrors.

_Emma Goldman’s Lectures in May_

At a recent meeting of the Chicago Woman’s Club, when all the editors of Chicago magazines explained the virtues of their respective journals, Lucien Cary said, politely but in effect, that THE LITTLE REVIEW was no good. “The only striking thing it has done (beside coming out at all) is to discover Emma Goldman, a nice woman with views less radical than Emerson’s and certainly far less well expressed.” I quote this because it is so exhilarating to catch Mr. Cary in a half-truth—the kind of thing that makes for the confused thinking he is so valiantly in arms against. If THE LITTLE REVIEW had been alive about twenty-five years ago I hope we would have had the sense to discover that a great woman was beginning to work in this country. As it is, we could only try to point out how difficult and how fine has been Emma Goldman’s living of the things Emerson thought it would be good to live. It was not for the people who know their Emerson that we tried it, but for those who have forgotten him, like Mr. Cary.... Since we failed so miserably we shall have to try again. But in the meantime you may hear Emma Goldman herself and discover just how she is helping to make Emerson’s essays livable. She is to lecture for a week in Chicago, in the most delightful lecture room in the city—the Assembly Room in the Fine Arts Building. Her subjects are as follows, at 8:15 in the evening:

_Sunday, May 9_:
“Friedrich Nietzsche, the Intellectual Storm Centre of the European
War.”

_Monday, May 10_:
“Is Man a Varietist or Monogamist”?

_Tuesday, May 11_:
“Jealousy” (Its Cause and Possible Cure).

_Wednesday, May 12_:
“Social Revolution vs. Social Reform.”

_Thursday, May 13_:
“Feminism” (A Critique of the Modern Woman’s Movements).

_Saturday, May 15_:
“The Intermediate Sex” (A Study of Homosexuality).

_Sunday, May 16_:
“The Limitation of Offspring” (A Discussion of How and Why Small
Families Are Desirable).

“_Dionysion_”

One of the most stirring things that has come to this office lately is a small journal with the word “Dionysion” on its cover. It is the first volume of a magazine for the furtherance of Isadora Duncan’s work in America, and the committee that has helped make this rather amazing thing possible includes such names as John W. Alexander, Percy MacKaye, Theodore Dreiser, Will Levington Comfort, Max Eastman, Robert Henri, Edith Wynne Mathison, Julia Culp, Witter Bynner, John Drew, Walter Damrosch, and many others. On the first page is Whitman, then Nietzsche on Dionysian Art, and then Robert Henri with a little article on the new education in which he says: “I was tremendously impressed one day in Isadora Duncan’s studio, by the look in the faces of the children. As they passed by me in the dance I saw great dignity, balance, ease. I was impressed, too, throughout the entire time by the fact that they seemed absolutely secure in their happiness. They appeared to know unconsciously that they would receive a full measure of praise and that in no case would there be blame or punishment. In each little upturned face was a rare look of freedom—the look of people on a higher plane of self-consciousness, an aloofness from the common thought. I saw in their expression the impress of the measures of great music.” And he goes on that “to inspire courage in children, to stimulate them with the work of those who have the courage to create, to make of them frank facers of the emotional problems of life, to start them on the way toward a great constructive life, we must take care not to impose our wisdom and our ignorance on them, but to give them the benefit of the best we have through a frank response to their natural interrogation.” Isadora Duncan’s idea is that “the expression of the modern school of ballet wherein each action is an end, and no movement, pose, or rhythm is successive or can be made to evolve succeeding action, is an expression of degeneration, of living death. All the movements of our modern ballet school are sterile movements because they are unnatural; their purpose is to create the delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist for them.” I know a man from Russia who came to this country knowing only two words of English: “Isadora Duncan.” He had seen Miss Duncan dance once in St. Petersburg and from that moment he looked forward to America as the country of “highest intelligences in the freest bodies.” We may sometime become worthy of this remarkable woman. _Dionysion_ ought to help....

_Isaac Loeb Peretz_

Last month, under the strain of relief work for the Jewish families driven from the war zone, there died in Warsaw a great poet, Isaac Loeb Peretz, almost unknown to the English reader, if we do not count one volume of his _Tales_, issued by the Jewish Publication Society. His poetry, written in Hebrew and in Yiddish, may be compared to that of Heine in its gracefulness, but it bears in addition the melancholy of Polish skies. His sketches in prose and his dramas are too subtle in their profound symbolism to be appreciated by the Jewish masses, who nevertheless, worship him as one of the few great artists who had not gone over to till strange fields, richer and more remunerative. The Jewish stage in America flourishes on Gordin’s melodramas and on cheap farces; the theatrical managers are too business-like to produce such a high play as Peretz’s _Golden Chain_.

_The St. Patrick’s Affair_

Emma Goldman sent me this letter about the two Italian boys, Abarno and Carbone, who have been found guilty of trying to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “Our efforts for the Italian victims were in vain. They were found guilty, although every bit of evidence brought out how the provocateur induced, urged the act, bought the material, made the bombs, and placed them in the cathedral. But the judge said that an officer has the right to do all this since he does it not out of criminal intent but ‘out of duty.’ Imagine what sort of sentence the boys will get from this cruel machine! I was in court all day until ten that night. I was near a collapse, so terribly had the day impressed me. At midnight they telephoned to tell me of the verdict. The horror of it all to me is the material which Polgnani chose—two typical proletarian slaves, one a boot black, the other a cobbler, both underdeveloped from malnutrition, irresponsible in their youthful inexperience, like two frightened deer driven at bay. To hear the lawyers refer to them as ‘fools,’ ‘degenerates,’ ‘ignoramuses,’ without a sign of protest on their part, almost drove me crazy. I had to restrain myself from pulling them to their feet to cry out against the cruelty and humiliation of it all. Life is terrible....”

_More Censorship_

A book called _Fewer and Better Babies: The Limitation of Offspring by the Prevention of Conception_, by William J. Robinson, has just been published by the Critic and Guide Company of New York. In looking through it I came upon several mysterious blank pages, and then found a foot-note explanation to the effect that the chapters on preventives had been completely eliminated by the censorship: “Not only are we not permitted to mention the safe and harmless methods,” says the poor author; “we cannot even discuss the unsafe and injurious methods.” But it probably won’t be long before Mr. Comstock is suppressed....

The Sermon in the Depths

(_Phosphorescent Gleams of Spiritual Putrefactions_)

BEN HECHT

Since reading the recent translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book which is called _The House of the Dead_[1] I have suffered from a distressing ambition. I would like to go to Russia and there commit some naive atrocity and be sent to a Siberian prison for at least ten years. I have an unpatriotic prejudice and a lack of illusion concerning American criminals or I would commit my atrocity on American soil. They, American criminals, are as a rule a petty lot given to sentimental regrets and griefs and reforms and periodicals. There is nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues. The American citizen even when about to be hanged is unable to rise above the commonplace reactions “imagined” for his predicament by such authors as belong to the Indiana Society.

I have hunted the American criminal with the police, been present at his confession, watched him at his trial, sat with him in his death cell and listened to him recite psalms and sermonize as the nervous sheriff adjusted the noose around his neck. He is an artificial and uninteresting disappointment. It would be as extreme a punishment to spend ten years in his society behind the bars as to live in a State Street Studio Building or join the Y. M. C. A. for a similar period.

But the “prison that stood at the edge of the fortress grounds close to the fortress wall” and the primitive, debauched children who inhabited it! The swaggering monstrosities that swilled on vodka and wept at the stars. The bestial grotesques who delighted in the murder of infants for the sake of the warm blood that bathed their hands. The filthy saints and nonchalant parricides. The Herculean villains, the irritable gargoyles innocently steeped in insatiable perversion and dripping with infamy. The arrogant, sadistic artists of torture, human as children, with their pitifully crippled souls; praying before the prison ikons, stealing their comrade’s clothes and washing his feet; hating and loving with the simplicity of Pagan gods and the ramified cunning of continental diplomats. The nerveless flagellants, the heartbreaking humorists, the fierce, fanciful executioners. There’s a company for you! A purifying company in the very dregs of its depravities.

They stand alone in literature. Only Christ could have written of them as well as Dostoevsky. Was Dostoevsky dreaming of a new religion when he filled the pages with his human crucifixions? Probably not. But his artistry and his painstaking, searching minute psychology have illumined _The House of the Dead_ so that for him who is not afraid it is as holy and human a source of inspiration as the loving sacrifices of the Nazarene Thaumaturgist.

And yet it is a simple book. There are very few writings so direct and simple, so easy to read and to understand. The terrifying lusts and passions and distorted rages make the mind quiver, but they never mystify. The harrowing morbidities pierce the intelligence like hot lances, but they never blunt or deprave the moral senses. The fierce pathos so exquisitely written, the blood-soaked restraints, the consumptive dying in his iron fetters too weak to support the weight of the little cross on his chest, the wild, inhuman humanness—they sizzle away the nerve cuticles and burn the emotions with a strange fire.

It is the peculiar paradox of reaction. I visited once a Home for Crippled Children and came away happier and cleaner. There the little misshapen bodies and the unconscious holiness of their suffering suddenly revealed to me things I had scoffingly overlooked in the popular words of accepted divines. And it is the same way with the company that writhes through the pages of Dostoevsky’s book. A more material illustration of this paradox is the very rhapsodics I have indulged in to convey what I have read. There are no rhapsodies in the book. There is no “dramatic action” at all in the book. It is the most inactive book I ever have read, barring not certain memoirs and diaries. Nothing happens in the book, yet from its start a demoralized pageant marches thunderingly across the pages, and somehow, by a psychological process it would take Dostoevsky again to reveal, lifts the spirit to heights as lofty as its itinerary is low. As for the style of its writing, there are no secrets in the art for the great Russian. And here he chooses the grim, gripping reiteration, the tragic calm and human poesy of simple words to build up his staggering effects.

What will Americans think of the book providing it becomes popular?—and it may. (The idolatrous regard born in this country for Russian art instances the possibilities of American hysteria directed in the proper channels.) The great majority of them, however—particularly those with whom I have mentioned my horror of spending ten years—will feel it incumbent upon them to be outraged, none more so than the criminal fraternity. It is perhaps stretching a point to say that even so were the highly and lowly estimable backbones of an earlier period of less comparative moribund piety outraged by the Sermon on the Mount. But there is a promising likelihood that their ectypes will never read the volume and will thus be saved or lost or whatever you will. And those who see the light from this Sermon in the Depths can effect an exclusiveness which will merit them the flattering curses and derisions of their fellow men for many sweet years to come.

The translation is by Constance Garnett and is excellently done. Mrs. Garnett, more than any linguist, has in her work conveyed the atmosphere and idiom and temperament of the Russian into English. She is responsible for the remarkable translations of Turgeniev which have carried his art unchanged into another tongue, as well as for the Dostoevsky novels. For the benefit of readers who will be puzzled by her footnote on page 11, the “Green Street” which she is unable to define is the avenue formed between two ranks of prison soldiers through which the condemned convict is wheeled and beaten. The soldiers stand armed with fresh, green sticks which flash brightly in the sun as they swish down on the naked back—hence the jocular name.

[1] _The Macmillan Company, New York._

Notes For a Review of “The Spoon River Anthology”

CARL SANDBURG

_The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. (The Macmillan
Company, New York)_

I saw Masters write this book. He wrote it in snatched moments between fighting injunctions against a waitresses’ union striving for the right to picket and gain one day’s rest a week, battling from court to court for compensation to a railroad engineer rendered a loathsome cripple by the defective machinery of a locomotive, having his life amid affairs as intense as those he writes of.

At The Book and Play Club one night Masters tried to tell how he came to write the Anthology. Of course, he couldn’t tell. There are no writers of great books able to tell the how and why of a dominating spirit that seizes them and wrenches the flashing pages from them. But there are a few forces known that play a part. And among these Masters said he wanted emphasis placed on _Poetry_, voices calling “Unhand me,” verses and lines from all manner and schools of writers welcomed in Harriet Monroe’s magazine.

Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here.

Masters’ home town is Lewiston, Illinois, on the banks of the Spoon River. There actually is such a river where Masters waded bare-foot as a boy, and where the dead and the living folk of his book have fished or swam, or thrown pebbles and watched the widening circles. It is not far, less than a few hours’ drive, from where Abraham Lincoln was raised. People who knew Lincoln are living there today.

Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.

Aner Clute is the immortal girl of the streets. Chase Henry is the town drunkard of all time. The railroad lawyer, the corrupt judge, the prohibitionist, the various adulterers and adulteresses, the Sunday School superintendent, the mothers and fathers who lived for sacrifice in gratitude, joy,—all these people look out from this book with haunting eyes, and there are baffled mouths and brows calm in the facing of their destinies.

When a few of the pieces in this book reached Ezra Pound, the judgment he passed upon them was that they are real and great poetry from the hand of a new and a genuine American poet. It was Alice Corbin Henderson who was the first American critic to seize upon some of these poems as they were running in _The St. Louis Mirror_, and put them forward in _Poetry_ as striking, indigenous, out of the soil of America as a home-land. William Marion Reedy, editor of _The St. Louis Mirror_, is accredited by Masters for the keen enthusiasm with which he helped him carry along the work of writing.

In the year 1914 Masters not only handled all of his regular law practice, heavy and grilling. Besides, he wrote _The Spoon River Anthology_. There were times when he was clean fagged with the day’s work. But a spell was on him to throw into written form a picture gallery, a series of short movies of individuals he had seen back home. Each page in the anthology is a locked-up portrait now freed.

The stress of this bore down on Masters. Just before the proof sheets for his book came to his hands, he went down with fever and pneumonia and a complex of physical ills. It was the first time in his life he was willing to admit he was “sick abed.”

There is vitality, drops of heart blood, poured into Lee Masters’ book. He has other books in him as vivid and poignant. Let us hope luck holds him by the hand and takes him along where he can write out these other ones.

Poetry and the Panama-Pacific

EUNICE TIETJENS

Has poetry, as an art, any meaning whatever for the American people, or has all the recent ink which has been spilled in proclaiming a renascence of American poetry gone only to water the roots of the publishing business? These are questions which will be forced upon the mind of every admirer of the lyric muse in contemplating the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. For in spite of the millions of money and the acres of ground at the disposal of the American sections there is nowhere, except in the commercial exhibits of the publishers, any recognition of the existence of contemporary poetry.

When taxed with the fact that the art is unrepresented the heads of the departments point deprecatingly to the fact that as a decorative feature of certain architectural archways poetical quotations are used. There is a quotation from Confucius, one from the Kalidasa, several from Edmund Spencer, and one (O Triumph of Modernity!) from Walt Whitman. As no commercial exhibit is accepted which was in existence at the time of the St. Louis Exposition this answer is doubly enlightening.

All the other arts are here. Architecture, music, sculpture, mural and easel painting, drawing, prints and etching, landscape gardening, together with the so-called “Liberal Arts” are adequately represented. But not poetry. A perusal of the “P’s” of the official list in an attempt to discover it is significant. “Poultry” is there with a large exhibit, so is “Plumbago,” “Plumbers’ Implements,” “Pomology” and “Ponies.” Excellent exhibits all, but hardly lyrical.

It may be urged, of course, that other arts, such as the arts of the theatre, acting and stagecraft, and the literary art of prose writing, are also omitted. But although exhibitions of these things would be eminently desirable they present great practical difficulties. And these arts have, after all, a commercial side which is more or less adequately suggested. But with poetry the case is different. The mere fact that commercially poetry is, like Perlmutter’s automobile, a liability and not an asset, ought in our practical age to prove that it is a “fine art!” And the practical difficulty of providing a set of bookshelves and a competent jury to pass on admissions need hardly stagger the directors of so colossal an undertaking. Add to this daily, or even bi-weekly, readings of contemporary poetry and the result would be a representation in proportion to the attention paid the other arts.

It would be useless to urge that this Exposition is a private, or even a local enterprise. It cannot stand as such. It represents in the face of the warring world the development of our country, culturally as well as commercially. And the fact that one of the oldest and most reverenced of the arts is totally unrepresented must inevitably redound to the discredit of the executive officers, and through them of the people at large.

For the root of this cavalier treatment of poetry is, after all, in the American people. As a nation, in spite of our complacency in the present world crisis, we are still in the stage of culture in which we believe that man can live by bread alone. And we can scarcely hope for more adequate recognition of the art until those of us to whom poetry is a living fact, and not an academic perception, have battled at greater length and with greater self-sacrifice in the eternal struggle through commercialism to beauty.

The Mob-God

The seats creak expectantly. The white whirr of the movie machine takes on a special significance. In the murky gloom of the theater you can watch row on row of backs becoming suddenly enthusiastic, necks growing suddenly alive, heads rising to a fresh angle. Turning around you can see the stupid masks falling, vacant eyes lighting up, lips parting and waiting the smile, mouths opening waiting to laugh. A miracle is transpiring. A sodden mass inclined toward protoplasmic atavism, a smear of dead nerves, dead skin, fiberless flesh is beginning to quiver with an emotion. Laughter is about to be born. The lights dance on the screen in front. Letters appear in two short words and a gasp sweeps from mouth to mouth.