Awake and Sing, Till the Day I Die, and Waiting for Lefty voiced the passion and poetry of the inarticulate. Lola Ridge remained the most intense as well as the most integrated of the revolutionaries, yet her work in Firehead and Dance of Fire was traditional in pattern, the peak of the latter volume being a sequence of mystical sonnets.

Much also had been expected from those who celebrated a "machine age poetry." In 1929 Hart Crane wrote, “Unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles, and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function." This sentiment was echoed by many, but few Americans carried out the process of assimilating or "acclimatizing" the machine. Three young English poets-W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewiswent further to justify Crane than any poet in this country. Crane himself almost accomplished it in The Bridge, but this ambitious poem failed in the end, partly because it lacked a culminating effect, partly because Crane was unable to solidify his mood and his material. MacKnight Black, hoping to communicate the spirit of Diesel engines and piston-rings in his Machinery and Thrust at the Sky, attempted unsuccessfully to unite new subject-matter and an old poetic vocabulary, merely romanticizing the mechanical objects. Others considered the wish to "express" the machine ill-advised and futile. For one thing, they maintained, the machine has been always with us without winning our affections; today it is no closer to man's emotions-and the stuff of poetry-than it was in the first days of the loom, the mill, the cotton-gin. For another, the machine has no fixed character; it changes too rapidly to become part of man's deeper experience.

It was a poet of the aristocratic tradition whose later work-particularly in Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City and in Panic-symbolized the impasse of the current social system and its tragic consequences. This poet who made the deepest impression since the advent of Frost and Eliot was Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish took the Symbolist manner further and broke new ground; he adapted the Eliot-Laforgue technique, as well as the form of Pound's Cantos and Perse's Anabase, and extended it. He began tentatively enough with The Pot of Earth, enlarged the gamut in Streets in the Moon, and declared himself fully in New Found Land and Conquistador, an epic in little. Adding several devices of his own-notably a skillful interior rhyme and a suspended terza rima-MacLeish perfected a verse which is both firm and delicate, sinewy yet supple. His unusually flexible line was used with genuine, not theatrical, eloquence in the play Panic, produced in 1935, a play whose power was projected in living symbols, pointing the possible revival of the poetic drama and emphasizing the importance of MacLeish's style.

THE NASHVILLE GROUP

In a preceding section mention was made of the spirit animating the new South. Apart from the short-lived Carolina local color school and the work of the previously considered Negro poets, the most important group centered about Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. It originated in a body

of teachers and students known as "The Fugitives," after their magazine which was published from April, 1922, to December, 1925. It was never explained what the fugitives were fleeing to escape, and it soon became apparent that there were differences of taste and temperament among the members. But a sense of their backgrounds, a sympathy beyond an ear for quaint localisms, bound them together. This unannounced expression of unity-a union of old dreams and new issues-was to develop into a controversy centering about Agrarianism, but it began with poetry and it was on poetry that the group maintained itself. John Crowe Ransom was the stimulator if not the founder of the school. He guided its fortunes and, for a while, dictated (unconsciously perhaps) its program and style. That style was a curious fusion of the pedantic and the metaphysical, a fusion which even he, in his later poetry, failed to lift above a cryptic overelaboration. At his best-and no less than a dozen poems represent him at that enviable height-Ransom has a finesse and a flavor unlike any other poet; he is master of an urbane grace and a mockery which masks a teasing tenderness. His vocabulary and his highly original technique equip him to sound the depths with a light and almost nonchalant touch; there are times when he even accomplishes an integration of the sublime and the ridiculous. Donald Davidson's style is less metaphysical and more emotional than Ransom's; his poems, particularly The Tall Men, reveal his concern with things rather than with abstractions. Originally influenced by Ransom and Eliot, Davidson found himself in his recreations and reveries of the War Between the States and, though he spent much of his energies teaching and reviewing, his longer poems have an almost epic breadth.

Allen Tate was the most unpredictable and belligerent of the group. Ten years younger than Ransom and five years younger than Davidson his energy was astonishing. He turned from poetry to biography, from biography to criticism, from criticism to controversy, from controversy back to poetry. Everything he did was achieved with distinction and despatch, everything except his poetry. His poetry continually called for revision-at least so it seemed to its author-and before he was forty Tate had published several versions of the same poems. Robert Penn Warren, born in 1905, the youngest of the group, is also the most fiery. Strong feeling forces itself through the simplest of his poems; pictorial verses, whose effect would ordinarily be merely visual, are surcharged with a plain-spoken force which seldom fails to communicate its excitement. Even the metaphysical conceit (a favorite device of "The Fugitives") achieves an unexpected intensity in his image-crowded lines. Merrill Moore, born in 1903, was the most fecund of the group, probably the most prolific of American poets. Before he was thirty he had composed so many sonnets-a rough calculation approximated the number at twenty thousand-that he had to resort to short-hand to get them down between his labors as instructor and psychiatrist. His poetry has both the charm and the handicap of improvisation; it suffers from its speed and the author's inability to review his errors or revise a single unfortunate phrase. But Moore's fluency results in many startling effects. Moreover, he has a particularly Southern humor-half grave, half grotesque—and he can make beauty out of banality, confronting the reader with wildness wrung from conversational small change.

The outstanding excellence of the Nashville group was its free use of the discord-juxtaposing the traditionally poetic and the common colloquial-and the establishment of a sharp-edged diction. In thought as well as technique it emphasized intelligence; it insisted on adult poetry as against the plethora of pretty, thoughtless, and immature verse written by adults. Its chief defect was a too frequent retreat into a remote classicism; with its metaphysical predilections the poetry sometimes became recondite and even incomprehensible. The stock of subjects grew low and, as John Gould Fletcher concluded in an otherwise sympathetic consideration of the school, "the 'Southern type' of poem tends to become distorted, fragmentary, obscure the more the poets speculate on the intellectual content as opposed to the emotional, or sensible, content of their subject matter." But the best of this poetry rose above its limitations and cleared a direction of its own.

RANGE AND DIVERSITY: STEVENS TO JEFFERS

After 1920 lines divided, ran parallel; groups coalesced, split apart; many tendencies were in the air at one time. The difficult and re-creative “process of unthinking" often degenerated into mere thoughtlessness, a tendency glorified by the "Super-realists" and the editors of transition. Opposed to this the "classicism" of Eliot pointed in a contrary direction. Joined to a cool scholasticism, orderliness came to offset the loose writing and looser thinking of the free verse plethora. Founded on a definite esthetic, intellectual rather than emotional, much of the new work achieved a shapeliness in which thought restrained sentiment, in which conception and perception were skillfully balanced.

Language was being tested in a dozen different directions; where one poet tightened the forms, another loosened them. A new semi-cavalier grace warred with forthright declarations. Wallace Stevens, departing from a depiction of things-actually disputing the "thinginess" of literature-perfected an orchidaceous flowering of words from words, achieving a type of witty suggestion new to the period. The euphuistic distortions of Maxwell Bodenheim and the over-luxuriant figures of E. E. Cummings grew in the same lustrum as the austere, later lyrics of Sara Teasdale and the emotional directness of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Of the younger men Horace Gregory and James Agee contributed striking work. Widely different though their poems were they had two characteristics in common: a combination of "high seriousness" and irony, and the ability to employ images straight from contemporary life.

An unprecedented vigor of language was brought into American poetry about 1926 by Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers successfully experimented with a peculiarly long line, whose strength matched the dark power of its author's philosophy. His technique derived from Whitman's, but his attitude was the antithesis of that over-emphatic affirmer's, and his images attained a strange pessimistic splendor. "The creatures of Jeffers's imagination," wrote Horace Gregory in The New Mythology, "strive, love, and die within a nightmare that is becoming known as the American consciousness, which is a poetic distortion of

the American scene. They are manifestations of a civilization that seems childishly innocent and harmlessly insane." Never had the range of American verse been so extensive, and Jeffers strenuously helped to extend it.

THE NEW LYRICISTS

The lyric note was bound to be affected. It, too, fluctuated to express the shift from convention to revolt, from decision to doubt, from a fixed form to an almost dissolving line. Conrad Aiken developed a peculiarly wavering music which, if often vague and repetitive, was capable of haunting effects, both in the early lyrics and the later somber preludes. David McCord alternated easily from the meditative to the whimsically mocking. Stephen Vincent Benét and William Rose Benét, brothers in blood and balladry, plundered modernity and antiquity for their fancies; the former, taking the Civil War for a background in John Brown's Body, constructed a many-voiced lyric of epic proportions. John Hall Wheelock luxuriated in leaping if somewhat determined affirmations. George Dillon, a singer in water-color, composed delicately patterned interrogations. The short lyrics of Robert Frost grew consistently in strength and suggestiveness.

The work of the women ranged from the outspoken to the involved. Two distinct influences governed many of them: Emily Dickinson and Lizette Woodworth Reese. The epigrammatic condensations of the former affected an entire generation with increasing force. The firm speech and sparse imagery of the latter won many away from the lush and cloying love-songs of the type enshrined in 1842 by Rufus W. Griswold in his waxwork Gems from American Female Poets. Edna St. Vincent Millay, in the later sonnets no less than in the early "Renascence," deepened an already impassioned note, increasing the admiration as well as the size of her audience. Sara Teasdale intensified a simple but flexible melodic line. Genevieve Taggard and Jean Starr Untermeyer lifted the ordinary round of woman's everyday into the extraordinary and, not seldom, into the ecstatic.

Others, refining their poetry of a too thickly human passion, turned to an elliptical metaphysics. The "mechanism of sensibility" brought them back to Crashaw, Vaughan, Webster, and Donne. One caught the overtones of the late Elizabethans in the accents of Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams, Hazel Hall, Elinor Wylie, among others. Elinor Wylie acknowledged the relationship implicitly, the title of her first volume (Nets to Catch the Wind) being taken from a poem by Webster, the title of her last (Angels and Earthly Creatures) from a sermon by Donne. But these poets did not depend too much on intellectual virtuosity and involuted images; their sensibility was their own. Less prodigal (and, it may be added, less passionate) than Donne and his followers, they reflected something of his order and his fiercely conceived beauty through temperaments essentially modern and feminine. Elinor Wylie, never "confusing the spiritual and the sensual either through false fear or false reverence," began with verbal brilliance and ended by celebrating the radiance of spirit and "the pure and valiant mind.” Léonie Adams, a more withdrawn metaphysician, yielded her secret only to those who were already poets, though even the unlettered could sense the music

and far-reaching implications. Tracing the swift mutability of time, and in particular these times, Louise Bogan, Marya Zaturenska, and Muriel Rukeyser outlined a poetry which was both sensuous and cerebral, intricately designed but deeply impassioned.

CRISIS AND DEPRESSION: 1929

Social as well as financial values crashed in October, 1929, but the blow did not immediately register on the poetry of the period. A few years later it became evident that a crisis had occurred in literature as well as in finance and government. The poets turned, tentatively enough, to a consideration of economic and social problems; some of them deserted poetry altogether. It is noteworthy that whereas the five years from 1913 to 1918 produced a dozen or more poets of national importance, not more than three or four new poets of any significance appeared between 1930 and 1935.

Poetry was affected by the general paralysis, unable to express the crisis except by negation. Yet, no matter what the conditions, man cannot remain inarticulate for long; there were signs that the younger poets, deeply affected by the breakdown, were grappling with the situation. It was not long before they attempted to express the universal bewilderment, doubtfully, even desperately. Theirs was a difficult task. Values were distorted, standards questioned, the traditional responses deadened. But the basic feelings, disbalanced and temporarily stunned, could not remain paralyzed.

The aftermath of the depression took the form of an increasingly critical examination of contemporary life, a frank and unflattering appraisal of men and motives. The questioning habit grew. At its best it attained the vigor of a challenge; at its worst it assumed a worn disillusion. Too often the loss of an integrating faith was reflected in a philosophy of formlessness, and complacent optimism was exchanged for complacent despair.

The style shifted to match the changing tempo, increasing speed and violence. The manner alternated from brusque to bitter; the tone was pungent rather than poignant; the attack was spasmodic, nervously staccato. The romanticized "personal attitude" was regarded with suspicion. The tensions of the false peace and the premonitions of war prompted a literature of nervous foreboding. Writers were torn by the contradictory claims of a planned economy and a planless do-nothingism. The result was a contradiction of outer form and inner confusion. Much of the poetry of the early thirties is not only the record of a vast nightmare, but an attempt to analyze it.

DIVISION IN THE THIRTIES

The decade following the crisis of 1929 revealed the growing importance of such highly idiomatic poets as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Horace Gregory, as well as the promise of Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Patchen, and Delmore Schwartz. It also disclosed two sharply divided tendencies. Division was marked in subject matter and vocabulary; it was emphasized by the writers' divergent attitudes to the reader. On the one hand, the work of