POETRY
33
Amy Lowell, Elinor Wylie and Vachel Lindsay are dead. Wallace
Stevens is remembered by
Harmonium,·
he is no longer a living poet.
Conrad Aiken's
Preludes
are mute testimony of his poetic bankruptcy.
Those of us who are writmg poetry today still remember and cherish
many of these poets at their best. But we value them as we value T. S.
Eliot and Ezra Pound-as poets whose best work was a spur toward our
own poetic activity; also, unfortunately, as poets whose best work, whose
very lives, fell far short of our needs and our aims.
Who then remains? Foremost is the figure of Hart Crane, strange,
tortured, mystical-author of
The Bridge
and
For the Marriage of Faustus
and Helen.
Two other poets are left: Archibald MacLeish and Robinson
Jeffers. The statures of both of these men have assumed great dignity
and power. But the influence of Jeffers is on the very young and unformed
or on the old and twisted and defeated. And MacLeish's influence is as
yet incomplete, since he continues to function as a poet, and as a poet to
grow and change. The stress in his work varies, so that younger poets,
reading his ·books, often feel that he himself is not quite clear about his
own direction.
I have listed here only those
po~ts
whose names have meaning to
the general public which reads and finds a certain importance and enjoy–
ment in poetry. They have been listed together, although there are many
vital differences in each individual's work.
A
discussion of these dif–
ferences, however, would be outside the immediate scope of this paper.
There are other American poets, less well known-such as Horace
Gregory, Malcolm Cowley, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold-whose mark:
on the younger revolutionary poets has been as great, if not greater, than
those whom I have mentioned.
Many of the older poets are important in American letters, if not in
American life. To be important to a country's life, a poet must 1Je more
than a skilled versifier (Stevens) or one who, however uncouth his metrics
{Sandburg), strikes a new, modern, living note. To be significant in
the most real sense, a poet must affect not ·only other poets, as some of
these older poets have influenced us; he must leave his mark: on the world
in which he lives and in which other men will live. His work: must reach,
in varying degrees of intensity, all the literate men of his age and land,
and, through them, the larger less learned mass. In the light of this,
we can say with certainty than none of the older poets really left more
than a fragmentary mark on their time or on ours.
We younger poets therefore look: to other men and to other material
for the stuff we need. Our "ancestors," to use a word which has assumed
almost a mystic meaning for several of our British contemporaries, will
be those men who have somehow come to symbolize the link: between the
