AN ANTHOLOGY EDITED BY HARRIET MONROE AND ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON EDITORS OF POETRY New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1917 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1917. Reprinted Norwood Press : Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. INTRODUCTION During the last three or four years there has been a remarkable renascence of poetry in both America and England, and an equally extraordinary revival of public interest in the art. The editors of this anthology wish to present in convenient form representative work of the poets who are to-day creating what is commonly called "the new poetry,”—a phrase no doubt rash and most imperfectly descriptive, since the new in art is always the elder old, but one difficult to replace with any form of words more exact. Much newspaper controversy, and a number of special magazines, testify to the demand for such a book; also many letters to the editors of Poetry asking for information-letters not only from individual lovers of the art, but also from college professors and literary clubs or groups, who have begun to feel that the poetry of to-day is a vital force no longer to be ignored. Indeed, many critics feel that poetry is coming nearer than either the novel or the drama to the actual life of to-day. The magazine Poetry, ever since its foundation in October, 1912, has encouraged this new spirit in the art, and the anthology is a further effort on the part of its editors to present the new spirit to the public. What is the new poetry? and wherein does it differ from the old? The difference is not in mere details of form, for much poetry infused with the new spirit conforms to the old measures and rhyme-schemes. It is not merely in diction, though the truly modern poet rejects the so-called "poetic" shifts of language-the deems, 'neaths, forsooths, etc., the inversions and high-sounding rotundities, familiar to his predecessors: all the rhetorical excesses through which most Victorian poetry now seems "overapparelled," as a speaker at a Poetry dinner-a lawyer, not a poet-put it in pointing out what the new movement is aiming at. These things are important, but the difference goes deeper than details of form, strikes through them to fundamental integrities. V The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute simplicity and sincerity-an ideal which implies an `individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. Thus inspired, it becomes intensive rather than diffuse. It looks out more eagerly than in; it becomes objective. The term "exteriority" has been applied to it, but this is incomplete. In presenting the concrete object or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus widens immeasurably the scope of the art. All this implies no disrespect for tradition. The poets of to-day do not discard tradition because they follow the speech of to-day rather than that of Shakespeare's time, or strive for organic rhythm rather than use a mold which has been perfected by others. On the contrary, they follow the great tradition when they seek a vehicle suited to their own epoch and their own creative mood, and resolutely reject all others. Great poetry has always been written in the language of contemporary speech, and its theme, even when legendary, has always borne a direct relation with contemporary thought, contemporary imaginative and spiritual life. It is this direct relation which the more progressive modern poets are trying to restore. In this effort they discard not only archaic diction but also the shop-worn subjects of past history or legend, which have been through the centuries a treasure-trove for the second-rate. This effort at modern speech, simplicity of form, and authentic vitality of theme, is leading our poets to question the authority of the accepted laws of English verse, and to study other languages, ancient and modern, in the effort to find out what poetry really is. It is a strange fact that, in the common prejudice of cultivated people during the four centuries from just before 1400 to just before 1800, nothing was accepted as poetry in English that did not walk in the iambic measure. Bits of Elizabethan song and of Dryden's two musical odes, both beating four-time instead of the iambic three, were outlandish intrusions too slight to count. To write English poetry, a man must measure his paces according to the iambic foot-rule; and he must mark off his lines with rhymes, or at least marshal them in the pentameter movement of blank verse. The first protest against this prejudice, which long usage had hardened into law, came in the persons of four or five great poetsBurns, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron-who puzzled the ears of their generation with anapasts and other four-time measures, and who carried into their work a certain immediacy of feeling and imagery—a certain modern passion of life—which even Cowper, Thompson and a few others of their time, though they had written of things around them, had scarcely attained. Quarterly critics and London moralists blinked and gasped, but at last the bars had to go down for these great radicals. And before long the extreme virtuosity of Swinburne had widened still further the musical range of the English language. By the time Whitman appeared, the ear of the average readerthat formidable person-was attuned to anapasts, dactyls, choriambics, sapphics, rhymed or unrhymed. He could not call them by name, but he was docile to all possible intricacies of pattern in any closely woven metrical scheme. But Whitman gave him a new shock. Here was a so-called poet who discarded all traditional patterns, and wove a carpet of his own. Once more the conservatives protested: was this poetry? and, if so, why? If poetry was not founded on the long-accepted metrical laws, then how could they distinguish it from prose, and thus keep the labels and catalogues in order? What was Whitman's alleged poetry but a kind of freakish prose, invented to set forth a dangerous anarchistic philosophy? It would take too long to analyze the large rhythms of Whitman's free verse; but the mere fact that he wrote free verse and called it poetry, and that other poets-men like Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds, even the reluctant Emerson-seemed to agree that it was poetry, this fact alone was, in the opinion of the con |