to the classics, than to remind ourselves of what is much more obvious, viz., that most of the great living poets of England are peculiarly intimate with the literatures of Greece and Rome. In Great Britain there has never, for many a generation past, been any break in the classical tradition. It is only in America that this has been interrupted, and today, as we have seen, the gap has again been bridged. Whitmanism, indeed, has proved a blessing in disguise. It has had a most salutary influence upon our poetry by recalling us to the great realities of life, from which, in academic exclusiveness, we have sometimes been tempted to stand aloof. But we have once more learned the lesson that for the creation of lofty and enduring poetry, we need something more than mere experience of life, however genuine. We have learned that such experience must be supplemented by sound literary training, and when this principle becomes generally recognized, sooner or later the Greek and Latin classics will once more come into their own. English literature by itself will never suffice, and our aspiring poets must themselves go to those perennial fountains from which all our greatest writers in the past have drunk so freely. The trouble at present is that our would-be poets are often content with superficial knowledge. The young versifier who, in Mr. Untermeyer's words “takes a sight-seeing tour through classical mythology" is no more steeped in the classics than is the prose-writer who a few weeks ago aired his knowledge of Latin in a book-review by speaking of somebody's "Apologia pro scripta sua!" Pope has written A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; and yet in these days of breadth of culture and variety of intellectual interests we must at times give heed to such an earnest plea as that made by the late Dr. Horace Howard Furness, when he said: “If I cannot, for lack of time, drink deep of the Pierian spring, let me, in heaven's name, at least take a sip. . . . . Does Nature offer us no beauty in shallowness? Do the shores of a lake sink at once to its greatest depth? Is it not from the shallows that water-lilies make glad the soul of man when they bare their heart of gold to the rays of the morning sun?"31 Not long ago, I found myself at a luncheon seated between two wellknown writers, one of them a poet, the other distinguished as one of the prolific and popular novelists of our day. The poet has published little, but one at least of her songs is likely to live on in American anthologies, because it not only throbs with life, but also has high artistic qualities. In the course of conversation the novelist confessed to me that though 31 Quoted by Le Baron Russell Briggs, in Men, Women, and Colleges, p. 78. her work was held in high favor, yet she was sadly aware that none of it had enduring qualities—not a line of it would outlive herself. In this I could not honestly disagree with her, especially as I had never read any of her stories, but I tried to encourage her to produce at least one great work of art, by which posterity would remember her. Then it was that she admitted her ignorance of really great literature. She had a facile pen, she knew how to make a popular appeal, but she was writing according to rule of thumb and had no definite standards for form, style, or even substance. For all her undoubted genius, she will never rise above mediocrity. It is well that the lady is not a poet, for, as Horace says: mediocribus esse poetis Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae. VIII For the classics do give us definite standards of both taste and achievement. They have stood the test of time. They have not served, in the gay phrase of Mme de Sévigné, merely "as a breakfast for the sun," but they have lived on, and have helped to mould the literatures of many nations. Without a knowledge of the classics, a modern writer is like a sailor adrift on the sea, without a compass or helm. He floats about aimlessly, and if he reaches some port, he does so in haphazard fashion, because the wind blows in that direction. But the writer at home in his classics has both compass and helm and need never lose his bearings. He has been trained in taste and expression and can bank upon a wealth of human wisdom and experience which he can utilize at every turn in the unfolding of his own. Above all he is possessed of criteria, which will often save him from extremes of bathos and bombast. As Chancellor Day once said, the classics are “a time-saver and a sure road to the topmost round of all things that require strong, critical, and clear thinking"-and surely that is the kind of thinking our poets need-not mere gush and sentimentality. It is this clear and critical thinking that is so characteristic of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and gives him such marked distinction. It is nearly ten years since the famous conference on classical studies at Princeton, which resulted in the publication by the Princeton University Press of the volume known as Value of the Classics. In this we find the testimony of statesmen and men of affairs; of clergymen, lawyers, and doctors; of engineers, physicists, and chemists; of professors of political science, economics, philosophy, fine arts, and other branches of knowledge. The book is an admirable one, and all classical scholars feel deeply indebted for its preparation to Dean West and his co-workers. But I think one more important group should have been represented that of those who are today engaged in creative literary work. To be sure, we have editors of newspapers and magazines, some of whose testimony is remarkably strong; but how much weight would have been added by the evidence of historians, biographers, essayists, novelists, and, above all, poets! Of this last group I find only two, Alfred Noyes and Henry van Dyke, and both of these speak merely in their capacity as teachers of English literature. Here then is a gap which I have tried to fill-not indeed by the direct testimony of our living poets, but by an examination of their written works, which give evidence of their faith. "Ye shall know them by their fruits." Even today our best poets look upon Latin and Greek as “living literature"; and, to judge from their experience, the best training for creative genius-to supplement native gifts-must still be found in the classics. Ellery Sedgwick has given us the formula: "Latin literature furnishes the supreme model for a straightforward, concise, and logical style. It teaches any appreciative student close thinking and direct expression. Greek civilization is the source of love for beauty and refinement.” The value of Latin is largely utilitarian, that of Greek mainly aesthetic, and one cannot study our chief poets without realizing how potent, and at times overpowering, is the appeal made to them by Greek. Was it not Goethe who once said: "Let us study Molière, let us study Shakespeare; but above all things the old Greeks and always the Greeks"? Of the Latin poets, Catullus, Lucretius, and Virgil are most deserving of a place beside the Greeks. Lucretius, especially, is in high favor in this scientific age, a time too when we hear so much of the spirit of revolt, of which "The Poet in the Desert" by Charles Erskine Scott Wood, is the most remarkable expression. Though Wood probably owes nothing to the influence of Lucretius, yet his spirit is kindred to that of the old poet who could write with such fiery ardor against the conventional beliefs of his day: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. But the Greeks-how fresh and modern they always are! Listen to these verses: Will they ever come to me, ever again, The long, long dances, On through the dark till the dim stars wane? Shall I feel the dew on my throat, and the stream 49 THE CLASSICS AND OUR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS Oh, feet of a fawn to the greenwood fled, Beyond the snares and the deadly press: Onward yet by river and glen . . . . To the dear lone lands untroubled of men, Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great? To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait; And shall not Loveliness be loved for ever? What joyous abandon, what delight in external nature, what romantic Do the Greeks seem far away? Not to those who possess the historic As a result of our individualistic tendencies, our numerous jostling nationalities, and our materialistic temper, we Americans are prone to regard the Past as being separated from us as by an insurmountable wall. We lack the sense of racial continuity. For us it is almost as though the world began yesterday morning; and too much of our contemporary literature is based upon that view. The affairs of antiquity seem to the generality of us to be as remote as the dimmest star, and as little related to our activities. But what we call the slow lapse of ages is really only the blinking of an eye. Sometimes this sense of the close unity of all time and all human experience has come upon me so strongly that I have felt, for an intense moment, how just a little hurry on my part might get me there in time to hear Aeschylus training a Chorus, or to see the wizard chisel still busy with the Parthenon frieze, or to hear Socrates telling his dreams to his judges. It is in some such mood that I approach that body of precious saga-stuff which I have called the Western American Epos; and I see it, not as a thing in itself, but rather as one phase of the whole race life from the beginning; indeed, the final link in that long chain of heroic periods stretching from the region of the Euphrates eastward into India and westward to our own Pacific Coast. Some day-and the day may not be far distant-the great American epic will be written. The author will be a poet to whom, as to Neihardt, antiquity will seem very near. He will be a modern Virgil, filled with the S RA TY ES greatness and glory of his theme-the achi will be familiar not merely with the chronic men have lived on American soil, but also land and with all the sagas of the Aryan r with the glory and honor that other nations But the poet will also be a seer, peering into less verse, full of echoes of all the great ep sing of the golden age to be, when wars sha true to her lofty ideals, shall take her rightf nations, "In the Parliament of man, the Fede |