TWO AMERICAN POETS
Priapus and the Pool. By Conrad Aiken. 8vo. 59 pages. Dunster House. $2.50.
Slabs of the Sunburnt West. By Carl Sandburg. 12mo. 76 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $1.75.
WHERE are the grand old days of American poetry? Remember how it was born; or rather, since this passive mood suits badly, how it bore itself back in 1914, the first of war babies. Before the Lusitania affair, if you remember, American poetry was built hastily like a skyscraper. Crowds gathered to comment on the thoroughly modern installation: open plumbing, critics running hot and cold like water, printing presses, magazines, two complete anthologists, even poets. Above the entrance arch was lettered in commercially-pure gold: THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Today this lettering remains, slightly tarnished. Anthologies still appear, each in its season, and critics function still, but those old and grand days of American poetry are over.
At least their contagious excitement has subsided. The poets of those days continue to write and usually write well, but they are making only literature now; they make history no longer. That perhaps 1s the reason no younger writers join their group (or has talent ceased utterly to develop?) Masters dies slowly after the childbirth of Spoon River. Robinson embalms himself in a collected edition. No one appears to close the gaping ranks. There are no new American poets.
For the adjective American belongs to a definite poetic generation. One rarely applies it to Poe, nor is Estlin Cummings, as a poet, American. An American poet is one whose first book, or whose first successful book, coincided roughly with the first year of the war. An American poet is Frost, Masters, Lindsay, Fletcher, Amy Lowell; by extension the term has even been applied to Walt Whitman. The adjective American is less national than temporal; a certain generation wear it like a rosette in the buttonhole; their work was brave enough to deserve a more definite decoration.
