The First Two Hundred Years of American Poetry

American Poetry from the Beginning to Walt Whitman,' Edited by Louis Untermeyer. (Jonathan Cape. 19s.) THERE are three books into which Americans have gathered the best of American verse. (The Orford Book of American Verse was not edited by an American.) The three books are the present volume, its companion volume Modern American Poetry, and Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag. There are scores of other anthologies to which the very full biblio- graphy at the back of this book will serve as a guide. Recently Mr. James Agate spoke of America's " one and a half pocts:' All who feel that way should see or buy these three books.

Naturally the chief interest of the verse of this first period is to watch the gradual charting out of America by the poets as they proceed on their spiritual voyage of discovery, and it is interesting to find that they saw better than they wrote, despite the circumscribing effect on their minds and eyes of the religious and political prejudices they brought with them from seventeenth-century England. It is for that reason that the Anne Bradstreets and the Benjamin Tompsons remain at least as interesting as the average minor versifier at home during the same period, and to Americans, of course, far Moms interesting. These were the days, as Tompson says—and the lines indicate that he is not without merit even as a poet " . . . before spiders and worms had drawn Their dingy webs, or hid with cheating lawn New England's beauties, which still seem to me Illustrious in their own simplicity."

In spite of such good lines in a man like Philip Freneau as :

" By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews In habit for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer, a shade!"

—lines actually stolen by Campbell and Scott—the increase in literary skill in the eighteenth century does not, as yet, compensate for the loss of originality. James Thompson would never have padded out his decasyllables, as Freneau did in The House of Night, with insignificant adjectives :

" Nor look'd I back till to a far-off wood Trembling with fear, my weary feet had sped— Dark was the night, but at the enchanted dome I saw the infernal windows flaming red."

To that sort of thing who would not prefer even Samuel Woodworth's Old Oaken Bucket or Bryant's Snow Shower ? And even in the nineteenth century I should for my part give the whole of Emerson and Longfellow for Whittier's warns and generous Snow-bound. I suspect a poet from whom the world quotes, as it can from Emerson, the felicitous phrase, just as one suspects the too-often-quoted lines from the Elegy in a. Country Churchyard. Everyone knows from Emerson : " Law for man and law for thing: The last builds-town and fleet, But it runs wild,

And doth the man unking."

" Heartily know When half -gods go, The gods arrive."

" The specious panorama of a year But multiplies the image of a day."

They are lines that, like all Emerson, are noble, abstracted and non-sensuous. Mr. Alfred Noyes once tried to prove against Matthew Arnold that Emerson is as concrete as one might wish, but it cannot be done. And from Longfellow, the fine and facile phrase-maker, full of unassimilated influences, who does not remember :

" And the night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And silently steal away—" Just as, to go a step further, spiritually if not chronologically, we all know from Poe, least American of poets :

" . . . the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome "

But nobody quotes from Snow-bound, just as nobody quoted from Wordsworth. The merit is deeper.

So the volume ends properly with Whitman, the poet in whom the American spirit first finds constantly vital, if not always felicitous expression. Command of the word he often had, and perhaps it will be best to leave it at that " often."

But it is the Appendix which contains the real America— what matter if, as so often happens in the actual America, one joyously depresses the bump of criticism as one goes through it ? Here are the native ballads and folk-songs, Indian, Spanish-Colonial, Negro, Cowboy, Backwoods, so- called " City Gutturals." They take one back to the Alle- glandes in Kentucky, and the Mississippi in flood, and the pueblos at Taos and Maria thumbing the pottery in San

and : and :

Ildefonso. Sir Walter Raleigh is once supposed to have said to an undergraduate, apropos of Pitcher and the. Pink 'Un : " Ah, my boy There's literature I " Read again Willy the Weeper—thOugh there are better versions than this one—and see literature in the raw.

It should be said that this is not merely an anthology. There is a long introduction, and every poet is prefaced by a careful, historical and critical commentary. It is a book prepared by an enthusiast, with the help of scholarship, for