Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) was an American poet and critic. She was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for What O’Clock (1926). This selection is from Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Lowell’s study of American poets such as Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, which was published in 1917.

When people speak of the “New Poetry,” they generally mean that poetry which is written in the newer, freer forms. But such a distinction is misleading in the extreme, for, after all, forms are merely forms, of no particular value unless they are the necessary and adequate clothing to some particular manner of thought.

There is a “New Poetry” to-day, and the new forms are a part of its attire, but the body is more important than the clothing and existed before it. All real changes are a matter of slow growth, of evolution. The beginnings of a change are almost imperceptible, the final stages, on the other hand, being so radical that everyone remarks them, and with such astonishment that the cry of “freak,” “charlatan,” is almost sure to be raised by ignorant readers.

A great artistic movement is as inevitable a thing as the growth of a race. But, as in races, individuals possess differing characteristics, so the various artists whose work represents a revolt may differ most widely one from another, and yet, in varying still more widely from artists of other epochs, they create what critics call a “movement.”…

A poetic movement may be compared to a braid of woven strands. Of the six poets of whom I shall speak, each is an exemplar, and I think the most typical exemplar, of a strand. But one particular tinge is peculiar to all the strands, and that particular tinge is revolt against the immediate past.

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We shall see these poets revolting against stilted phrases and sentimentality; we shall see them endeavouring to express themselves, and the new race which America is producing; we shall see them stepping boldly from realism to far flights of imagination. We shall see them ceding more and more to the influence of other, alien, peoples, and fusing exotic modes of thought with their Anglo-Saxon inheritance. This is indeed the melting pot, and its fumes affect the surrounding company as well as the ingredients in the crucible.

To understand the change which is going on in American poetry, it is necessary to glance back for a moment to earlier conditions.

If we examine the state of American poetry from, let us say, 1830 until the Civil War, we shall be struck with one thing. That is, with the racial homogeneity of our poets. They are all of good English stock, in their work, I mean. It is true that two great geniuses flung themselves up out of this mass of cultivated endeavour. But that is no exception to the Anglo-Saxon rule, for no literature is richer in geniuses than is the English. But these two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, were too far ahead of their times to have much effect upon their contemporaries. They are better understood, and have more followers, in the America of to-day. Wordsworth on the one hand, Byron on the other, were the main springs of American poetry.

Good poetry, if not strikingly great poetry, marked the epoch of Whittier, Bryant, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes. They were English provincial poets, in the sense that America was still a literary province of the Mother Country.

But from the Civil War until almost the present day, the literary sponsors of American verse were much less worthy of disciples. The robustness of Byron gave place to the sugared sentimentality of Tennyson; the moral strength of Wordsworth made way for the frozen didacticism of Matthew Arnold. But worse was to follow, for technique usurped the place of emotion, and words, mere words, were exalted out of all due proportion. Swinburne and Rossetti are not good masters to follow, no matter with what skill they themselves wrought. Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become. No matter how beautiful a piece of music may be, we cannot hear it indefinitely without satiety, and the same piece rendered by a phonograph soon becomes unbearable. Our poets were largely phonographs to greater English poets dead and gone, as the pages of our magazines of twenty years ago will abundantly prove.

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Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line. Faultless, flowing verses, raised about a worn-out, threadbare idea—fine moral sentiments expressed in the weak, innocuous language of the hymn-books—had no resemblance to the temper of modern American life. Publishers still printed poetry, but not with any idea of its answering a demand; editors accepted it to round out short pages, but they hardly expected to have more attention accorded it than an ornamental scroll would have received. Readers found more sustenance in Browning, and bewailed the fact that he was dead, and, alas, English! America was not a country for poets, said the wiseacres, it was given over to materialism, and materialism could never produce art.

This was tantamount to saying that art was an artificial thing, whereas making steel harrows was a natural thing. Of course, that is a ridiculous point of view. Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.

Now here was a great country practically dumb. Here was a virile race, capable of subduing a vast continent in an incredibly short time, with no tongue to vent its emotion. How should such a race express itself by the sentiments appropriate to a highly civilized country no bigger than New York State, and of that country some fifty years earlier, to boot?

I would not be construed into saying that the larger the country, the more profound the emotions. That would be absurd. I only mean that the material conditions under which Americans lived—the great unoccupied spaces, the constant warring and overcoming of nature, the fluid state of the social fabric—all made a different speech necessary, if they were really to express the thoughts that were in them.

There was one other element in the constitution of the American people, quite as important as these I have mentioned. That element was, and is, the ingrained Puritanism which time and place do so little to eradicate. Of course, the dwellers in large cities, worked upon from their earliest childhood by modern conditions, were able to modify the Puritan sentiment, to cast out what of poison remained in it. For Puritanism, at this late day, has resolved itself into a virulent poison which saps vitality and brings on the convulsions of despair.

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Puritanism was always a drastic, soul-searching, joyless religion. It was itself a revolt against a licence that had become unbearable. But no student of history can fail to be struck with the vigour and healthy-mindedness of a race which can live under such an incubus and retain its sanity. There is no more horrible page to the student than that of the early times in New England, when nervous little children were tortured with exhortations to declare their faith and escape the clutches of the devil, and senile old women were hanged for witches. Moloch and his sacrifices of human victims is no more revolting. Yet, in spite of much infant mortality, and many of the weaker members of a community going insane, the people as a whole lived and throve under this threatening horror, with the vitality of a race born to endure.

Indeed, my simile of a drug is no idle comparison. For Puritanism undoubtedly did much to strengthen the fibre of the early settlers, but its prolonged effect has been to produce anæmia and atrophy, and where these do not follow, where the strength of the individual keeps him fighting for the cause of individuality against the composite thought of a race, the result is an innate cynicism, a dreadful despair which will not let him be.

The age of Bryant and Longfellow was singularly free from these negative, but powerful, results of the Puritanic poison. Didactic and moral these poets undoubtedly were, but with them the paternal tradition was diluted by nothing more violent than time. They were in sympathy with its main trend only; like fruits set in the sun, the substance itself had mellowed and sweetened. Living in a highly educated community, they modified with it, and only so far as it, too, modified. They were not at war with their times, their surroundings, or their fellow citizens.

In the case of smaller places, the result is very different. Here, Puritanism held sway quite out of time. It persisted long after it had become an anachronism to New England at large. An individual brought up in one of the small towns scattered over the country was therefore obliged to reproduce suddenly in himself the evolution of three hundred years. In so far as he was advanced mentally beyond his fellows, he suffered the pangs of growth and misunderstanding. And his evolution carried with it the farther torture of consciousness. Sudden change can never accomplish the result of a long, slow process. What large cities like Boston lived into, the clever youths of smaller towns were thrust violently upon.

We must never forget that all inherited prejudice and training pulls one way, in these unfortunate cases; the probing, active mind pulls another. The result is a profound melancholy, tinged with cynicism. Self-analysis has sapped joy, and the impossibility of constructing an ethical system in accordance both with desire and with tradition has twisted the mental vision out of all true proportion. It takes the lifetime of more than one individual to throw off a superstition, and the effort to do so is not made without sacrifice.

(1917)