Chapter The Innovators of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

5. "To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

6. "Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry."¹

Robert Frost, born 1875.

Although Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, he is distinctively a New England poet and his two important volumes, North of Boston (1915) and Mountain Intervale (1916), are the natural product of the granite New Hampshire hills among which he made his home in 1900. For nearly three years (1912- 1915) Robert Frost was in England with wife and children, living in a suburban town, making acquaintance with young English poets, and finding a needed stimulus in new associations. It was in London that his first volume of verse, A Boy's Will, was published, in 1913; his second volume, North of Boston (in its first edition), followed the next year. There are, however, no suggestions of the English environment in either volume. The poetry in the first volume, largely subjective, is more conventional than that which followed. The later poems are mainly narrative, -- serious, sometimes sombre tales, realistic, human, -- very true to the psychology of New England; but these are interspersed with brighter pastoral sketches like Mending Wall, Mowing, After Apple Picking, and Birches, poems which grow spontaneously out of the simple, toilful farm life. A word should be added with regard to the metrical form adopted by the poet as the medium of his verse. It is not that of the typical free verse poets -- yet it has all the freedom of that unconventional school. More closely resembling the ten-syllable line of the standard blank verse form, but with varying metre and stressed pauses together with an extra syllable where needed, the rhythm adjusts itself with an easy freedom to follow the natural tones of living speech.

Vachel Lindsay, born 1879.

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was born in Springfield, Illinois, a city to whose spiritual upbuilding he devoted no small amount of energy -- as witness the publication of The Golden Book of Springfield (1921). It was indeed as a preacher of the gospel of Beauty that Lindsay began his work, with a sincerity and an originality equally remarkable. On walking trips in the South and later while tramping across the state of Kansas and farther west, the poet carried a thin-leaved pamphlet of sixteen pages containing Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, "printed expressly as a substitute for money" to be exchanged for food and lodging while on his pilgrimage. A skillful draughtsman -- Lindsay had studied art in New York -- he illustrated with drawings and cartoons the gospel of Beauty which he proclaimed. The death of the great organizer and leader of the Salvation Army inspired the poem which introduced to its readers this new poet of the Middle West, -- General William Booth Enters Heaven. There was more than mere originality in this impressive composition, a lyric grotesquely conceived yet strikingly appropriate to its theme; a vociferous chant to the rhythm of a familiar Salvation Army hymn, accentuated by the beat of the bass drum and the jingle of tambourines. There was more than the mere unconventional license of the verse; there was a freedom of movement and a command of words, a power of imagination and a sense of the spiritual significance of the event that compelled a startled admiration for its daring and its success. This poem gave the title to Lindsay's first volume, in 1913. The Congo and Other Poems (1914) added two other compositions characteristic of this period of the poet's work. The title poem, "A Study of the Negro Race," was the first, with its accompaniment of boom and rattle, the chant of voodoo rites in the African jungle, rag time and cake walk revels, religious ecstacy -- a weird blending of noise and poetry. The second was The Santa Fé Trail, an epic of the automobile following the historic highway to the coast, to the honking music of the horns with lyric interludes of bird-song from the hedges where the Rachel-Jane --

"Not defeated by the horns
Sings amid a hedge of thorns:--
`Love and life,
Eternal youth--
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet,
Dew and glory,
Love and truth,
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.'"

The Chinese Nightingale (1917) continued this novel type of composition. All these poems are intended to be declaimed in a kind of chant -- the nature of which is suggested by explanatory notes in the margins.