21 JANUARY 1922, Page 20

POETS AND POETRY.

TENDENCIES IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY.* I HOPE that everyone who reads the book will notice what is not very clearly stated in the present edition of Miss Amy Lowell's Tendencies in Modern American Poetry—that this is the third printing of a book finished in 1917. In four years a good deal of water has run under the mill. Therefore, in a book only about Americans, the fact that Miss Lowell does not mention the work of Mr. Louis Untmeyer, Mrs. Eunice Tietjens or • Tendencies in Modern American Poeirm. By Amy Lowell: Oxford.: Basil Blackwell. 112s. ed. net.] Mr. Vachel Lindsay is not a proof of such fantastic perversity as we should be inclined to imagine. I do not think, either, that Miss Lowell would now be capable of the somewhat primitive remark that " the criticism of art should be first and foremost and all the time aesthetic." I fancy that by now, also, the glamour of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters' admirable and striking journalism in " The Spoon River Anthology " has a little worn off.

What remains of interest in the book is a charming account of " H. D." and Richard Aldington, the two young Imagist poets who read Greek together and married Miss Lowell's analysis of " H. D.'s "

Whirl up, Sea Whirl up your pointed pines, ` and her general summary of the theories of verse cadence are