In _High John the Conqueror_ (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys
real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos
bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come
to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action,
without creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.

33. Poetry and Drama

"KNOWLEDGE itself is power," Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin,
and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households
and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in
knowledge of mediocre verse.

I had rather flunk my Wasserman test
Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.

The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in
assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pass
no power into any human being unless it itself has power--power
of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other
attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste
for the best makes the other kind insipid.

Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as
mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as compared with the great
body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre
poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is
merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have
to look at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot
down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the
expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, and before long they
disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in
public libraries.

Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the
nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may
be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single
gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty
phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it
is positively nothing.

The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of his
poetical consequence--of the Southwest was Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. He
led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic
of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six
volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been