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versions of English ballads and border minstrelsy, of which the Lonesome Tunes discovered in the Kentucky mountains by Howard Brockway and Loraine Wyman are excellent examples. But later, a more definitely native spirit found expression in the various sections of these states. In the West (during the seventies) Bret Harte and John Hay celebrated, in their own accents, the rough miners, ranchers, steamboat pilots, the supposed descendants of the emigrants from Pike County, Missouri. In the Middle West the desire for local color and music led to the popularity of James Whitcomb Riley's Hoosier ballads and the spirited jingles of Eugene Field. In the South the inspiration of the negro spirituals and antebellum songs was utilized to excellent effect by Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris and, later, by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Since the days of Dunbar, the Negro has made great strides in self-expression; the impress of his spontaneity is evidenced in a great portion of the art of the day. American music-classical as well as popular-has benefited from the strong insistence of African drums and the syncopated shuffling of the feet of slaves. Jazz itself has become glorified; today the intelligentsia practically claim it as their own! In sociology the Negro, through men like W. E. Burghardt Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley, has become his own analyst. In poetry the results are still mixed and uneven. But it is apparent that the Negro is beginning to free himself, not only from a sentimentality designed to please the whites, but from an attitude which was not so much raceconscious as self-conscious. Of the spirituals which preceded the Civil War, he does not echo the soft wish-fulfilment of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Comin' for to Carry Me Home"; his spirit, grown sterner, reflects the more courageous strength of "Let My People Go" and "Gwine to Shine All Over God's Heaven!"

Although it is too early for final estimates, no résumé of the period could fail to recognize the work of James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Alex Rogers and, most significant

of all the Aframerican group, the young and variously gifted Countée Cullen.

The Indian, a more ancient primitive, has been as difficult to adopt poetically as he has been to assimilate ethnically. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the white and red races are worlds apart in sentiment, philosophy, and attitudes to life, many gallant attempts have been made to bring the spirit of the Indian into our literature. The late Natalie Curtis Burlin did excellent pioneering work in The Indian's Book; Mary Austin, in spite of a far-fetched theory and unsound conclusions, has made an extended study of the matter in The American Rhythm; and The Path On the Rainbow, edited by George W. Cronyn in 1918, is, by all odds, the best collection on the subject available to the public. Among the individual workers in the field, other than those mentioned, special praise must be given to Constance Lindsay Skinner, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Lew Sarett. Of these, Sarett has been the most successful in capturing the fluid combination of dance, tune, ejaculation, and occasional vivid phrase which we so loosely call the poetry of the North American Indian.

In the West today there is a revival of interest in backwoods melodies and folk-created verse. John A. Lomax has published two volumes of cowboy songs-most of them anonymous-full of tang, wild fancy and robust humor. The tradition of Harte and Hay is being carried on by such racy interpreters as Harry Herbert Knibbs, Badger Clark and Edwin Ford Piper. The Kentucky Mountain region is being interpreted by Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Roy Helton. The "white South" has found expression through John Crowe Ransom, DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen. But, of all contemporaries who approximate the spirit of folk-poetry, none has made more striking or more indubitably American contributions than Vachel Lindsay of Springfield, Illinois.

LINDSAY AND OPPENHEIM

Lindsay is essentially a people's poet. He does not hesitate to express himself in terms of the lowest common denominator; his fingers are alternately on his pen and the public pulse. Living near enough to the South to appreciate the Negroes' qualities without wishing to theatricalize them, Lindsay has been tremendously influenced by the colorful suggestions, the fantastic superstitions, the revivalistic gusto, the half-savage Christianity and, above all, by the curiously syncopated music that once characterized the black man in America. In "The Congo," "John Brown" and the less extended but equally remarkable "Simon Legree," the words roll with the solemnity of an exhortation, dance with a grotesque fervor or snap, crackle, and leap with all the humorous rhythms of a piece of "ragtime." Lindsay catches the burly color and boisterous music of camp-meetings, minstrel shows, revival jubilees. He seems to be an itinerant evangelist preaching the Gospel through a saxophone.

And Lindsay does more. He carries his democratic determinations further than any of his confrères. His dream is of a great communal Art; he insists that all villages should be centers of beauty, all its citizens, artists. At heart a missionary even more than a minstrel, Lindsay often loses himself in his own doctrines. Worse, he frequently cheapens himself and caricatures his own gift by pandering to the vaudeville instinct that insists on putting a noisy "punch" into everything, regardless of taste, artistry or a sense of proportion. He is most impressive when he is least frenetic, when he is purely fantastic (as in "The Ghosts of the Buffaloes," the shorter fancies, the series of metaphorical poems about the moon) or when a greater theme and a finer restraint unite (as in "The Eagle That Is Forgotten") to create a preaching that does not cease to be poetry.

Something of the same blend of prophet and poet is found in the work of James Oppenheim. Oppenheim is a throwback to the ancient Hebrew singers; the music of the Psalms

rolls through his lines, the fire of Isaiah kindles his spirit. This poetry, with its obvious reminders of Whitman, is biblical in its inflection, Oriental in its heat; it runs through forgotten centuries and brings buried Asia to busy America. It carries to the Western world the color of the East, adding the gift of prophecy to pragmatic purpose. In books like War and Laughter and Songs for the New Age the race of god-breakers and god-makers speaks with a new voice; here, with analytic intensity, the old iconoclasm and still older worship are again united.

THE LYRIC NOTE

Recent though the renascence has been, it has already a lyric significance which no other period can equal. Although every season swells the list of native singers, none has surpassed the subtle if sometimes crepuscular music of Conrad Aiken, the devious but strongly accented airs of John Crowe Ransom, the galloping fancies of William Rose Benet, the leaping if not always controlled lyricism of John Hall Wheelock. This list of lyric writers might well have been headed by Robert Frost, had not Frost already been considered in a previous section.

The work of the women, in quantity as well as variety, has excelled that of most of the male minnesingers. Two influences-both American-are already evident: Emily Dickinson and Lizette Woodworth Reese. The epigrammatic condensations of the former have tempted many of the lyric poets still further back, even to the tortured beauties of Donne, Marvel and Webster. The straightforward speech and sparse imagery of Miss Reese has won an entire regiment of writers away from the ornate and primping love songs of the type enshrined by Rufus W. Griswold in his Gems From American Female Poets, an invaluable side light on what the "female poet" felt she ought to write in 1842.

Prophesying about contemporaries is a hazardous occupation. Yet I think it safe to say that not much of the work of this period will outlast "Renascence" and half a dozen

other poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, certain of the unsentimental love songs of Sara Teasdale and several of the brilliant clarities of Elinor Wylie. And it seems unlikely that anthologists of the future, choosing among the two score latter-day Sapphos who have published volumes of no little merit, will allow their readers to forget the three leading lyricists already mentioned as well as the names of Adelaide Crapsey, Hazel Hall, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth J. Coatsworth, Genevieve Taggard, Winifred Welles, Léonie Adams, and Jean Starr Untermeyer.

THE NEW SPIRIT

The new poets have won their audience not only by their actual accomplishments but by their differences. Nothing is more stimulating in contemporary American poetry than its range. For the first time in the history of our literature there is a body of verse which is panoramic rather than parochial. Few of the poets belong to any one school or tendency; they are, differing widely from most of their English fellow-craftsmen, far less hampered by the burdens of tradition or the necessity of casting them off. In such a collection as this there is little evidence of either the placid acceptance of old routines or revolt for the mere sake of revolting. Never has there been such catholicity, such variety of thought and gesture. All forms are being used-new ones are even being invented. Both in the conventional and the experimental modes, America has become a literary melting-pot in every sense. The very variety of subject matter is in striking opposition to the thin, limited products of the transition poet. Geographically, the range is no less wide. New England is no longer the one literary center; there is scarcely a village which cannot boast a local laureate. As the country has matured, the poets have grown with it, springing up in the most unlikely places, ready to celebrate the urban miracles of stone and steel as well as the gaunt prairie silences.

It is as if submerged springs had suddenly burst through

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