dsay, something of Mr
Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar
figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what
principle they are assembled together. Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded,
a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which
she teases out into stupid 'originalities.' Of the other two gentlemen
we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also
nothing which convinces us that they may not be.

Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them. All
three have in common what we may call creative energy. They are all
facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all
obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that
whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways. Not one of them
produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that
he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom 'thus
and not otherwise' engraved upon their substance; not one has proved
that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of
poetry, no matter what technique be employed--how to achieve a
concentrated unity of aesthetic impression. They are all diffuse; they
seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at
once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue;
they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod--and they are all
interesting.

They are extremely interesting. For one thing, they have all achieved
what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.
Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay's
'Congo' or Mr Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' or Mr Aiken's 'Jig of
Forslin' without being impelled to read on to the end. That does not
very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry
save in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
and their similars. There is, however, another case more exactly in
point, namely, that of Mr Kipling. With Mr Kipling our three American
poets have much in common, though the community must not be unduly
pressed. Their most obvious similarity is the prominence into which
they throw the novel interest in their verse. They are, or at moments
they seem to be, primarily tellers of stories. We will not dogmatise and
say that the attempt is illegitimate; we prefer to insist that to tell a