FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77  
78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   >>   >|  
wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with poetry's profound, spiritual insights. The promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly this to-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed up in that curious symbol which appears over the letter _n_ in the word "canon." A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of the American poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point about the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell into a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. This renaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority of readers and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let us glance at a few of the more popular explanations. Many say that poetry declined in America because we turned ourselves into a nation of entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is true, how do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds and waterfalls, for groves of ancient trees, national parks, and city-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annual expenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the Fatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original, most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no utterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras, that produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury, French, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than Wall Street's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers of New York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, Bar Harbor's Building of Arts, West Point, and Princeton University. It is plain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism. Other philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetry was the fault of the poets themselves. Popular interest slackened, they say, because the art first degenerated. Now an obvious answer to this is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become, men may always turn, if they will, to those dead poets of old who live forever o
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77  
78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

poetry

 

poetic

 

prosaic

 
national
 
answer
 

matter

 
explain
 

American

 

decline

 

renaissance


America
 

declined

 

Barnard

 

French

 

Woodbury

 
Winslow
 

founded

 

people

 

superb

 
orchestras

supported

 
produced
 

standing

 

sculptors

 

painters

 

hopelessly

 

materialistic

 
strongest
 

original

 

sculpture


evident

 

landscape

 

suggestive

 

significant

 

precisely

 

sphere

 

utterly

 

Boston

 

interest

 

Popular


slackened

 

degenerated

 

materialism

 

philosophers

 

obvious

 

living

 
forever
 

wholly

 

terminals

 

cathedral