take the only native expression we have, our conversation, and intensify it.
The result is curious. Without the rootage of folk-song and folk-art there is a certain thinness, a loss of overtones. But there are real compensations—the work is,-as I said, indubitably American, fresh, spacious, and free. Perhaps also it might be said that Whitman raises American conversation to oratory; that he carries the common speech into the speaker's stand, and attempts thus to give it a less personal, a more collective fibre.
Our new generation of poets has been unable to ignore Whitman. The strange service he performed for us was to give us a substitute for folk-song. That is to say, we can't go back to folk-art, but can go back to Whitman and thus catch for our own work the overtones of an American past. That the result need not be strictly Whitmanic is obvious. Masters in Spoon River has used conversation and discarded oratory; Frost, Untermeyer, and Lindsay have done the same and discarded free verse; Amy Lowell has developed the form and wherever advisable discarded conversation.
It is necessary to note here that the Whitmanic attempt has appeared in our fiction and essay. Parallel with Whitman came Emerson, and out of Emerson, William James, and writers like Dewey, Veblen, and Randolph Bourne, save that James and Bourne, more than the others, incorporate the conversational in the Whitman manner. Dreiser and Anderson in fiction also spring from Whitman, though here we have the forerunner, Mark Twain; but their success I think is limited by the reasons given above. The result of all this many-stranded development, as well as an inner evolution, is a marked change in American conversation. At Whitman's time there was a choice between Colonial and popular. The choice is different to-day. Popular expression is not the only kind that is American; we have the beginning of an intelligentsia, and this younger world has a conversation of its own. That this conversation bears resemblance to the speech of H. G. Wells and Masefield is not surprising—for these two writers, as well as Rolland, have been under American influence. Wells owes much to William James, Rolland exceedingly much to Whitman. No better proof of the vitality of American style could be produced than this influence abroad.
I should say that our new poetry leans either to the conversation
