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Week Six: Literary Renaissance / A Literature of Social and Cultural Challenge Part I - Poetry

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Part Introduction Literary Renaissance © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

Literary Renaissance

Twentieth-century spiritual unrest and skepticism were deeply rooted in nineteenth-century thought, transmitted from the old to the new era in the United States, by such writers as William James, George Santayana, Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser, William Vaughn Moody, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Simi- larly, the spirit of economic and social revolt can be traced from the later works of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells through the writings of Upton Sinclair and Jack London to those of Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Sinclair Lewis. After 1900, realism and naturalism, as well as new experiments in literary form, continued to draw inspiration from such nineteenth-century masters as Dos- toevsky, Turgenev, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, and the French symbolist poets; from such English Victorians as Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George Moore; from the playwrights Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw; from the French novelist André Gide; and from the Irish poets and playwrights William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. Romantic idealism survived in genteel nostalgia and in some genres of popular literature; Poe and Melville began to rival Irving and Longfellow in esteem; Whitman, largely ne- glected by Americans during his lifetime, came to exert one of the most powerful influences on the verse of the twentieth century; Emily Dickinson, posthumously published in 1890, became a poetic force after 1914; and Henry James, an exotic to his American contemporaries, entered the mainstream of twentieth-century lit- erature. Meanwhile, women authors such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Gertrude Stein influenced many later writers from the beginnings of their formida- ble careers. The stage was set for the next act of American literature.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE By 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, a new age of literary expression had begun. In the 1920s, the volume of American literary activity, the large num- ber of new authors; the high level of their powers; the originality, daring, and gen- eral success of new forms of expression; and the absorbed response of a reading public larger and more critical than ever before produced a new national litera- ture that rivaled in brilliance the regional flowering of New England a century earlier. The basis for this twentieth-century renaissance was established during the second decade of the century; the First World War barely interrupted the tide of innovation, although it provided fresh themes and focused even more sharply the spiritual problems and disillusionments of this critical generation of writers.

Early in the decade, Ezra Pound, newly arrived in London, met Yeats and his circle, found a like sensibility in the English critic T. E. Hulme, and gathered around him a youthful group of British and American poets, including H. D.,

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Part Introduction Literary Renaissance © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

Richard Aldington, and Amy Lowell. He christened this coterie “Les Imagistes,” and they inaugurated a new poetry movement, published aesthetic manifestos, and collected their poems in imagist anthologies. Pound also became foreign edi- tor of Harriet Monroe’s new and important Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded in Chicago in 1912. During this period, Edwin Arlington Robinson consolidated his fame in The Man against the Sky (1916) and Merlin (1917), the first of his Arthurian poems. Robert Frost published his first two books in 1913 and 1914; the second was the great North of Boston. Three poets suddenly provided star- tling voices and images for the American Midwest: Vachel Lindsay, whose chant- ing, declamatory verse won him meteoric success in three volumes between 1913 and 1917; Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology (1915) enjoyed an almost unprecedented immediate success; and Carl Sandburg, whose Chicago Poems (1916) inaugurated his long and productive career as an American bard. In the West, Robinson Jeffers found his congenial subject, but not yet his mature voice, in California (1916). In the East, Edna St. Vincent Millay published her first collection of poems in 1917, the year of her college graduation. T. S. Eliot, mid- westerner turned easterner turned Londoner, appeared at once in his mature char- acter in two volumes published by 1920.

The novel’s growth was more congruent with its past. In 1911 Dreiser published Jennie Gerhardt, his first novel since 1900. In rapid succession the appearance of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The “Genius” (1915) established him as the great naturalist of his generation and gave encouragement to the nascent naturalism of younger authors. In 1911 Edith Wharton produced in Ethan Frome a small naturalistic masterpiece of immediate influence. Ellen Glasgow in the same year published The Miller of Old Church, a novel in the “Old Dominion” series that grew in depth and interest with such later works as Barren Ground (1925) and Vein of Iron (1935). In 1913 Willa Cather found her mature subject in the Ne- braska plains and immigrants of O Pioneers!, which she followed in 1918 with My Antonia; in The Song of the Lark (1915), she combined those materials with her discovery of the desert civilization of the Southwest, on which she later based her masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Novels important for the outrage they caused among conventional moralists, because they dealt with subjects foreshadowing the greater sexual freedoms of the 1920s, include David Graham Phillips’s posthumous Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (1919). Two masterworks, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920), capped a decade in which a new realistic vision, tempered in the emotional fires of naturalism, con- firmed a dark and questioning view of the new century and prepared the ground for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.

The new poetry and fiction formed part of a general intellectual expansion that included the vigorous criticism of Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, James G. Huneker, Joel E. Spingarn, and Van Wyck Brooks. Popular satirist H. L. Mencken began his crusade before 1910 and reached the height of his effectiveness after 1924 as editor of The American Mercury; he waged unceasing war on the mass mind, directed his eloquent wrath against the defenders of official “decency” and self-appointed guardians of other people’s morals, and championed such “im- moral” authors as Dreiser, Cabell, and Anderson.

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Part Introduction Literary Renaissance © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

By 1920 patterns were set for the literature that followed. Newer authors would be characterized, like the generation before them, by aesthetic originality and rebellion, by the determination to scatter conventional taboos against the ex- pression of physical and psychological actuality, by a hunger for spiritual enlight- enment sought in symbolic or primitivistic expression, and by a renewed sense of responsibility for fellow human beings, expressed in direct attacks on the contem- porary social order. In its more revolutionary aspects, this was a renaissance that targeted the fundamental institutions and cultural assumptions of society; its lead- ers affirmed the dignity and value of the individual in the face of the dehumaniz- ing forces of the new century. Most authors in the generations younger than Dreiser did not continue his uncompromising naturalism, yet literature continued its concern for individuals trapped by blind laws of heredity and environment or buffeted by uncomprehended chance. Characteristic elements of naturalism are joined with the realists’ objectivity in Hemingway and his successors; naturalism mingles with primitivism in the novels of Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright and with primitivistic and Freudian elements in Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill, and Erskine Caldwell; it is reflected in the inescapable connection be- tween environment and fate in the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1935) of James T. Farrell and in the Marxist view of history that energizes John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1930–1936). Indeed, the First World War and its aftermath of political unrest, economic boom, and then worldwide depression only strengthened the growing belief that history is a mechanism responding to the obdurate dynamics of force and mass.

POETRY BETWEEN THE WARS Noteworthy in the literary revival after World War I were the opulence, power, and popularity of poetry and drama. The imagist and free verse movements begun before the war, the popularity won for verse by Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg, and the continued mastery of Frost were manifestations within the United States of a period of international ferment. In this climate, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922) was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modernism that was to set the model for much of the most accomplished poetry of the next half century. But this rich period supported many other kinds of poetry as well.

In general, American poetry from the beginning of World War I until the end of World War II became increasingly subtle in its symbolism, more reliant on allu- sions to earlier literary works or to suggestions of mythological meaning, and more inclined toward intellectual depth and brilliance. Pound and the imagists found in- spiration in the French symbolists, the classics, the troubadour poets, the Italian Renaissance, and ancient Chinese and Japanese forms. Eliot also emphasized the inspiration of philosophy, religious thought, Eastern mysticism, and anthropologi- cal lore, renewing literary attention to the Elizabethan poets and dramatists and the English metaphysical poets of the Jacobean period. Intense metaphysical im- ages heightened the intellectual tension and symbolic range of poetry, making it more difficult but also more capable of representing by abstraction the emotional significance of ideas. Not all poets followed Pound and Eliot into the more extreme recesses of their theories and practices, but few remained uninfluenced by a pro- gram offering such riches. The poets grouped in this book as “Poets of Idea and Order,” idiosyncratic in many ways, shared an active search for unifying principles

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Part Introduction Literary Renaissance © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

of vision and versification to give shape to the apparent fragmentation and inco- herence of the world they inhabited. Williams’s “no ideas but in things” and Stevens’s “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” both pointed to eternal verities inherent in the phenomenal world, and both writers sought poetic lines re- flective of immediate and eternal order in ways that unfettered free verse could not attain. Both waited for recognition until the era of Eliot and Pound was drawing to a close. Marianne Moore’s syllable counting gave strict regulation to lines freed of the repeated accentual patterns in traditional verse in English. The Nashville “Fugi- tives” John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate forged an impressive amalgam that hon- ored the lessons of modernism while asserting the values of an agrarian society and the strengths of traditional versification. Hart Crane rejected the cold detachment and classical allusions of Eliot to build The Bridge from blocks of personal remem- brance and familiar American stories and legends.

Meanwhile, Frost remained the great outsider to the practices of modernism, Jeffers won a large audience for his bleakly naturalistic California narratives, Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay found popular audiences and critical acclaim with lyric gems wedding traditional forms to the wry and cynical observations of liberated women, and African American writers responded to this new climate of openness with the spurt of energy known as the Harlem Renaissance.

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Part Introduction Literary Renaissance © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

History Literature

German submarine sinks the 1915 Ezra Pound begins Lusitania Cantos

Provincetown Players established Edgar Lee Masters “Petit, the Poet”; “Elsa Wertman”

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken”

President Wilson reelected 1916 Carl Sandburg president “Fog”; “Monotone”; “Gone”

U.S. enters World War I 1917 Susan Glaspell Russian Revolution breaks out “A Jury of Her Peers”

On November 11, an armistice 1918 Theodore Dreiser ends World War I “The Second Choice”

The Theater Guild established

Race riot erupts in Chicago 1919 Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio

Wallace Stevens “Anecdote of the Jar”; “Ploughing on Sunday”

Prohibition begins after the 1920 Edwin Arlington Robinson Eighteenth Amendment is ratified “Firelight”; “The Mill”; by every state but Connecticut “Mr. Flood’s Party” and Rhode Island Robert Frost

The Nineteenth Amendment “Fire and Ice” gives women the right to vote Ezra Pound

“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

Congress establishes a quota 1921 Elinor Wylie system by which annual “Wild Peaches”; “Sanctuary”; immigration could be regulated “Prophecy” and decreased Marianne Moore

“Poetry” Langston Hughes

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

1922 T. S. Eliot The Waste Land

Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape

Claude McKay “America”

Teapot Dome scandal 1923 Ellen Glasgow “Jordan’s End”

Robert Frost “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Edna St. Vincent Millay “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”

Wallace Stevens “Bantams in Pine-Woods”

William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow”

E. E. Cummings “Buffalo Bill’s”

Jean Toomer Cane

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Part Introduction Literary Renaissance © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

History Literature

Calvin Coolidge elected president 1924 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) in a landslide “Heliodora”

The Scopes trial 1925 T. S. Eliot “The Hollow Men”

Amy Lowell “Meeting-House Hill”

Robinson Jeffers “Roan Stallion”

Countee Cullen “Heritage”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway “Big Two-Hearted River”

1926 Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises

Archibald MacLeish “Ars Poetica”

First talking movie, The Jazz 1927 John Crowe Ransom Singer “The Equilibrists”

Charles Lindbergh flies the first successful solo transatlantic flight

Stock market crashes 1929 William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

Thomas Wolfe “An Angel on the Porch”

Katherine Anne Porter “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

1930 Allen Tate “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

Hart Crane The Bridge

John Dos Passos The 42nd Parallel

Scottsboro defendants arrested 1931 Edna St. Vincent Millay “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink”

F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited”

William Faulkner “That Evening Sun”

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (1869–1935)

Among the most gifted of his country’s poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson is also no- table for the scale and versatility of his work. Yet it is not easy to recall a poem, large or small, that does not illustrate his painstaking zeal for perfection even in the last de- tail of structure or phrasing. His perfectionism is not mere fussiness but an intrinsic discipline of form and meaning. Robinson is truly philosophical, profound in thought and expression, and given to probing the subtlest areas of human psychology.

Robinson was descended through his mother from Anne Bradstreet, New En- gland’s first colonial poet. He was born at Head Tide, Maine, on December 22, 1869. His father, aged fifty, had just then retired from business, and the family at once moved twelve miles down the Kennebec, to Gardiner, the “Tilbury Town” of his poems.

Robinson had more than the usual handicaps to overcome. Late-born into his family, he was made conscious, as he grew up, of the example of his materially successful brothers in a community where such success was taken for granted. After graduation from high school he spent four difficult years in apparent idle- ness while reading extensively and laboring steadily at his verse, which editors as steadily declined to publish.

At the age of twenty-two he entered Harvard University, and he remained for two years as a special student, principally of philosophy, literature, and languages. The death of his father in 1893 caused his withdrawal and inaugurated a period of mental depression. A chronic abscess of his ear for several years kept him in pain, and he feared he would lose his mind. The family inheritance was greatly reduced by the panic of 1893. Both his brothers, who had begun so brilliantly, proved un- stable and then died within a few years, while his mother went into a long and har- rowing illness. Just before his mother’s death, the serious love affair of his youth was terminated in sorrow. Thereafter he shyly avoided such entanglements; in any case, not until he was fifty could he have married on his income as a poet.

His mother’s death relieved him of family responsibility. In 1896 he settled in New York, and, unable to find a publisher, he had The Torrent and the Night Be- fore printed at his own expense. The February 1897 Bookman observed that his verse had the “true fire,” but that “the world is not beautiful to him, but a prison house.” Robinson’s letter of reply, in the March number, contained a now-famous appraisal of his view of life. “The world is not a ‘prison house,’” he said, “but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ‘God’ with the wrong blocks.” The next year he included most of these poems in his second volume, The Children of the Night (1897), again defraying the costs of publication. These volumes ushered into the world such “bewildered infants,” now famous, as Aaron Stark, with “eyes like little dollars,” and Richard Cory, for whom a bullet was medicine, and Luke Havergal, caught in the web of fate.

After a year in New York he accepted an appointment at Harvard as office sec- retary to the president but proved wholly unfit for such routine. Back in New York, while not gregarious, he was far from being such a recluse as is often imagined. According to Fullerton Waldo, he loved the bustling life of the streets as “Charles Lamb loved the tidal fullness along the Strand.” For years he lived in Greenwich Vil- lage, in the then-bohemian area near Washington Square. There he had as intimates

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such writers and staunch friends as Josephine Preston Peabody and William Vaughn Moody, whom he had known at Harvard, and E. C. Stedman, Percy Mackaye, Her- mann Hagedorn, Ridgely Torrence, and Daniel Gregory Mason, the composer, who taught music at Columbia. When Captain Craig finally secured a publisher in 1902, the poet was for a time spared the knowledge that it had been subsidized, secretly, by Gardiner friends. The revelation of this, together with the small sale of the volume, in- creased his desperation during 1903–1904, when he worked as a subway-construction inspector. Creative work under these circumstances was nearly impossible.

In March 1905, he received his first check in ten years for writing accepted by a magazine, and within a week there arrived a letter from the president of the United States. Kermit Roosevelt, whose master at Groton was a Gardiner friend of the poet’s, had sent his father a copy of The Children of the Night, which the president had much admired. Now, learning of the poet’s plight, he had him ap- pointed to a clerkship in the United States Custom House at New York. The salary was small, but Robinson had once again the time and energy for poetry. By the end of Roosevelt’s term he had prepared the volume The Town Down the River (1910), and the president’s influence had secured its publication by Scribner’s.

Although it is reported that for years this notable poet depended in part on the unobtrusive benefactions of his admirers, he was never again forced to waste his limited strength to obtain mere subsistence. A studio was provided for him in New York. After 1911 he spent many summers at the MacDowell Colony at Pe- terborough, New Hampshire, a retreat for artists, established in memory of Ed- ward MacDowell. There, through succeeding summers, he completed the longer works of his second period.

In the Arthurian poems, each the size of a separate volume, Robinson devel- oped a highly individualized blank verse, lofty in character yet modern in its speech rhythms, equally adaptable for sustained narrative, dialogue, and dramatic effects, and for the poet’s characteristic discussion of ideas. His wit is nowhere seen to better advantage than in his long narratives. It is not dependent on what is comic in the ordinary sense, but springs from the recognition of essential incon- gruities at the core of reality and rewards only those who can follow the poet’s fundamental thinking. The Arthurian poems are faithful to the sources—Malory and such Continental chroniclers as Wolfram—but the characters have been rein- terpreted in modern terms. The world of Arthur, in chaos as a result of the greed and faithlessness of its leadership, corresponded, it seemed to Robinson, to the condition of things at the time of the First World War. Merlin appeared in 1917, Lancelot in 1920, and Tristram in 1927.

The poet’s financial rewards increased very slowly, but his first collection, Col- lected Poems (1921), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and so was The Man Who Died Twice (1924), a major narrative of fantastic design but great power and moral significance, on the theme of regeneration. Tristram also won the Pulitzer Prize, and as a selection of the Literary Guild, a book club, it gave the poet his first large sale. During the remaining nine years of his life, Robinson’s financial worries were ended.

In his last years Robinson created several long narratives of modern life, be- ginning with Cavender’s House (1929). These are psychological studies of charac- ter, all dealing, in various lights, with the nature of human guilt or fidelity, with the destructiveness of the desire for power or for possession. The Glory of the

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Nightingales (1930) and Matthias at the Door (1931) are the climax of Robin- son’s criticism of modern life and subtly incorporate the constant symbols of light, darkness, regeneration, and responsibility that prevail in his poetry from the be- ginning and reach their highest tragic synthesis in Tristram. Talifer (1933) is a so- cial comedy of subtlety and brilliant wit, in a vein of meaningful worldliness. King Jasper (1935), although it shows traces of the fatigue of a dying man, is a cleverly managed allegory and is interesting as revealing the final phase of the poet’s devel- oping concept of patrician responsibility in democratic leadership.

The standard edition is Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1921; enlarged editions ap- peared periodically through 1937. Collections of letters are Selected Letters, compiled by Ridgely Tor- rence, 1940; Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith, 1890–1905, edited by Denham Sutcliffe, 1947; and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Letters to Edith Brower, edited by Richard Cary, 1968. Standard biographies were published by Hermann Hagedorn, 1938; and Emery Neff, 1948.

Memoirs and critical studies are Lloyd Morris, The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1923; Mark Van Doren, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1927; L. M. Beebe, Edwin Arlington Robinson and the Arthurian Legend, 1927; Charles Cestre, An Introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1930; R. W. Brown, Next Door to a Poet, 1937; E. Kaplan, Philosophy in the Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1940; Yvor Winters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1946; Edwin G. Fussell, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1954; Louis Untermeyer, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Reappraisal, 1963; Chard P. Smith, Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1965; Hoyt C. Franchere, Edwin Arlington Robin- son, 1968; and Louis Coxe, Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry, 1969. Richard Cary edited Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1969. Nancy Carol Joyner edited Edwin Arlington Robin- son: A Reference Guide, 1978.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Richard Cory © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed, 5 And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, ‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— And admirably schooled in every grace: 10 In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 15 Went home and put a bullet through his head.

1897

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Miniver Cheevy © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old 5 When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; 10

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,1

And Priam’s2 neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town, 15 And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,3

Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one. 20

Miniver cursed the commonplace And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the medieval grace Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought, 25 But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; 30

Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.

1910

1. Thebes: ancient Greek city, prominent in Greek history and legend. Camelot: legendary site of King Arthur’s court in the Arthurian romances. 2. King of Troy and the father of the heroes Paris and Hector. 3. Renaissance merchant-princes, rulers of Florence for nearly two centuries, noted equally for their cruelties and for their benefactions to learning and art.

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Robert Frost Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)

Among the great American poets since Whitman, Robert Frost is the most univer- sal in his appeal. His art is an act of clarification, an act which, without simplify- ing the truth, renders it in some degree accessible to everyone. Frost found his poetry in the familiar objects and character of New England, but people who have never seen New Hampshire or Vermont, reading his poems in California or Vir- ginia, experience their revelation.

It is therefore not surprising that this poet of New England was first recog- nized in old England and that his boyhood was passed in California. His father, a journalist of southern extraction, left New Hampshire during the Civil War, and his professional engagements led him to California. There the poet was born on March 26, 1874, and was named Robert Lee in memory of the Old Dominion. He was eleven when his father died and when his mother returned to her people in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Amherst, New Hampshire.

Life with relatives proved difficult, so his mother went to teach school in Salem, New Hampshire. Frost later attended Lawrence High School. On gradua- tion in 1892 he was one of two valedictorians; the other was Elinor White, whom he married three years later. Reluctant to accept his grandfather’s support at Dart- mouth College, Frost did not finish the first semester. Instead he tried himself out on a country paper, then turned to teaching school. He sent out his verses in quan- tity after 1890, but only a negligible few were accepted before 1913. Like Robin- son, he was much ahead of his time.

Faced with disappointment as a poet, his family growing, the young Frost ac- cepted his grandfather’s assistance and studied at Harvard for two years (1897– 1899), but he concluded that formal study was not the way for him. His good foundation in the classics is apparent in his extraordinary word sense, in the dis- ciplined forms of his poetry, and in his pagan delight in nature. His reading of sci- ence and philosophy has been influential throughout his poetry. But he had a deep-rooted fear: “They would have made me into a professor, or into a profes- sional,” he once said.

In 1900, with his grandfather’s help, he procured a farm at Derry, New Hamp- shire, supporting his family, including four children, by a combination of farming and teaching. From 1900 to 1911 he taught English at Pinkerton Academy, Derry. In 1911–1912 he conducted a course in psychology at the State Normal School in Plymouth. Still he received from American editors the same heartbreaking refusals.

Elinor Frost, a steady source of inspiration, encouraged his instinct for a des- perate remedy. They sold the farm in 1912 and on the small proceeds went to En- gland, where the first stirrings of a new poetry movement had been noted. Wishing, as he says, to live “beneath a thatched roof,” they moved to a small farmstead in the country. There Wilfred W. Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie were neighbors, and others of the so-called Georgians, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, came as guests. Soon A Boy’s Will (1913) was hailed in England as a work of genuine

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merit. It was followed in 1914 by North of Boston, one of the great volumes of the twentieth century. Both books were republished in the United States within the year. At this point, according to a friend, Frost said to his wife, “My book has gone home; we must go too.” In 1915 they were settled again on a New Hampshire farm, near Franconia, which suggested the title of Mountain Interval (1916).

In 1916 he read “The Ax-Helve” as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard Uni- versity. Frost had magnificent qualities as a public reader; his reading tours during many years made him and his poetry household property and stimulated a popu- lar interest in poetry. Also in 1916, Frost became “poet in residence” at Amherst College, where he returned for a time each winter for four years. At various times he served as lecturer or fellow at Wesleyan, Michigan, Dartmouth, Yale, and Har- vard. In 1920 he participated in the founding of the Bread Loaf School of English (Middlebury College, Vermont), and he lectured there many summers. He lived nearby on his own land at Ripton.

Frost’s later publications appeared at rather long intervals, yet almost every poem, large or small, is unforgettable. His Selected Poems (1923, revised 1928) was followed by New Hampshire (1923), which won the Pulitzer Prize. This is one of his longest poems, but one of his most witty and wise, an anecdotal discus- sion of the values of life and character, flavored with New England examples. In 1928 he published West-Running Brook, its title poem a complex masterpiece. Collected Poems first appeared in 1930 and won him his second Pulitzer Prize. A Further Range (1936) also was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His later volumes of lyrics are A Witness Tree (1942) and Steeple Bush (1947). A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) are dramatic dialogues—discussions of re- ligious insights and contemporary society.

Few major poets have shown such remarkable consistency as Robert Frost— and he captures the reader as much by the grandeur of his poetic persona (despite the sometimes difficult personal relations of the actual poet) as by impeccable rightness of form and phrase. “Art strips life to form,” he said, and the substance and the words of his poems coexist in one identity. In language, he sought to catch what he called the “tones of speech,” but even more successfully than Wordsworth he pruned the “language really used by men” to achieve a propriety that sponta- neous speech cannot attain.

For all his descriptive realism, Frost was temperamentally a poet of medita- tive sobriety. The truths he sought were innate in the heart of humanity and in common objects. But people forget, and poetry, he said, “makes you remember what you didn’t know you knew.” A poem is not didactic but provides an imme- diate experience which “begins in delight, and ends in wisdom”; and it provides at least “a momentary stay against confusion.” Of man alone or man in society Frost demands a responsible individualism controlled by an inner mandate, and

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Robert Frost Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

thus his views remind us of the transcendentalism of earlier New Englanders. Like Thoreau and Emerson, Frost was willing to become a rebel in this cause, and like them, but so unlike the skeptical poets of his age, he had, he said, only “a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

The most complete Frost is the Library of America edition of Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, 1995. An earlier standard edition is The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, 1969. Selected Prose of Robert Frost was edited by Hyde Cox and E. C. Lathem, 1966.

The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer were edited by Untermeyer in 1963. Lawrance R. Thompson edited Selected Letters, 1964; and Arnold Grade edited Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost, 1972. A volume of reminiscences is Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking, 1965. E. C. Lathem edited Interviews with Robert Frost, 1966, and A Concordance to the Poetry of Robert Frost, 1971. Frost: A Time to Talk: Conversations and Indiscretions, 1972, was compiled by Robert Frances. Elaine Barry edited Robert Frost on Writing, 1973. E. C. Lathem and Lawrance Thompson edited early articles in Robert Frost: Farm-Poultryman, 1981. William R. Evans edited letters in Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship, 1981.

Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915, 1966; Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938, 1970; and Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963, 1977 (this last volume with R. H. Winnick) constitute a definitive life by Frost’s designated biographer. Much kinder to Frost, however, is William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, 1984. Edward Connery Lathem, Robert Frost: A Biography, 1981, is a one-volume abridgment of Thompson’s three volumes. See also Elizabeth S. Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, 1960; Jean Gould, Robert Frost * * *, 1964; Louis Mertins, Robert Frost * * *, 1965; John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912–1915, 1988; and Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography, 1996.

Early biographical and critical studies are G. B. Munson, Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense, 1927; Sidney Cox, Robert Frost: Original “Ordinary Man,” 1929; Caroline Ford, The Less Traveled Road: A Study of Robert Frost, 1935; Lawrance R. Thompson, Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost, 1942; Sidney Cox, Swinger of Birches, 1957; Reginald L. Cook, The Dimen- sions of Robert Frost, 1958.

Recent criticism includes Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost * * *, 1963; J. F. Lynan, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost, 1964; Radcliffe Squires, The Major Themes of Robert Frost, 1963; Philip L. Gerber, Robert Frost, 1966; Reginald L. Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, 1975; Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, 1977; John C. Kemp, Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist, 1979; James L. Potter, The Robert Frost Handbook, 1980; John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1988; George Monteiro, Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, 1988; and Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost, 1996.

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ROBERT FROST

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: 5 I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10 But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. 15 To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!” We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20 Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across 25 And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: “Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30 Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35 That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him, But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather He said it for himself. I see him there, Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40

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He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45

1914

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ROBERT FROST

The Ax-Helve

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted ax behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch. 5 This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day Behind me on the snow in my own yard Where I was working at the chopping-block, And cutting nothing not cut down already. He caught my ax expertly on the rise, 10 When all my strength put forth was in his favor, Held it a moment where it was, to calm me, Then took it from me—and I let him take it. I didn’t know him well enough to know What it was all about. There might be something 15 He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor He might prefer to say to him disarmed. But all he had to tell me in French-English Was what he thought of—not me, but my ax, Me only as I took my ax to heart. 20 It was the bad ax-helve some one had sold me— “Made on machine,” he said, plowing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. 25 “You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off. Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?” Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?

“Come on my house and I put you one in What’s las’ awhile—good hick’ry what’s grow crooked, 30 De second growt’ I cut myself—tough, tough!”

Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded.

“Den when you say you come? It’s cost you nothing. To-naght?”

As well tonight as any night.

Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove 35 My welcome differed from no other welcome. Baptiste knew best why I was where I was. So long as he would leave enough unsaid,

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I shouldn’t mind his being overjoyed (If overjoyed he was) at having got me 40 Where I must judge if what he knew about an ax That not everybody else knew was to count For nothing in the measure of a neighbor. Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees, A Frenchman couldn’t get his human rating! 45

Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair That had as many motions as the world: One back and forward, in and out of shadow, That got her nowhere; one more gradual, Sideways, that would have run her on the stove 50 In time, had she not realized her danger And caught herself up bodily, chair and all, And set herself back where she started from. “She ain’t spick too much Henglish—dat’s too bad.” I was afraid, in brightening first on me, 55 Then on Baptiste, as if she understood What passed between us, she was only feigning. Baptiste was anxious for her; but no more Than for himself, so placed he couldn’t hope To keep his bargain of the morning with me 60 In time to keep me from suspecting him Of really never having meant to keep it.

Needlessly soon he had his ax-helves out, A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me To have the best he had, or had to spare— 65 Not for me to ask which, when what he took Had beauties he had to point me out at length To insure their not being wasted on me. He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free from the least knot, equal to the strain 70 Of bending like a sword across the knee. He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay 75 For the hard work. He chafed its long white body From end to end with his rough hand shut round it. He tried it at the eyehole in the ax-head. “Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.” Baptiste knew how to make a short job long 80 For love of it, and yet not waste time either.

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Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge? Baptiste on his defense about the children He kept from school, or did his best to keep— Whatever school and children and our doubts 85 Of laid-on education had to do With the curves of his ax-helves and his having Used these unscrupulously to bring me To see for once the inside of his house. Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one 90 To leave it to, whether the right to hold Such doubts of education should depend Upon the education of those who held them?

But now he brushed the shavings from his knee And stood the ax there on its horse’s hoof, 95 Erect, but not without its waves, as when The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,— Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down And in a little—a French touch in that. 100 Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased: “See how she’s cock her head!”

1917, 1923

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CARL SANDBURG (1878–1967)

Carl Sandburg’s parents were Swedish immigrants, living at Galesburg, Illinois, when the boy was born on January 6, 1878. The father was then working in a railroad construction crew. They were a healthy and affectionate family, though very poor. At thirteen, Sandburg was obliged to leave school and go to work. For a time he found employment in Galesburg; then he became a migratory laborer, roaming from job to job in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. He was at various times a milkman, a harvest hand, a hotel dishwasher, a barbershop porter, a stage- hand, a brickmaker, and a sign painter. For a while he was a salesman of stereo- scopes and the popular stereoscopic views of the day—a profitable employment and a good education for a poet of the people. In 1898, at the age of twenty, he settled again in Galesburg to follow the trade of house painter, but the Spanish- American War excited his interest and he enlisted in the army. During active ser- vice in Puerto Rico he functioned as correspondent for the Galesburg Evening Mail, his first newspaper connection.

In eight months he was back in Galesburg, determined to secure a higher edu- cation. He had been reading hard with this in view, and he was provisionally ad- mitted at Lombard College, although he might have preferred Knox, across town, where Lincoln had met Douglas in one of the famous debates of 1858. Young Sandburg had a good scholastic record, made a serious beginning with his writ- ing, and became a local celebrity at basketball, but he did not graduate. A few weeks before the end of his senior year, in 1902, with all his record clear, he sim- ply disappeared from the scene. For several years he lived as a roving newspaper reporter. In 1907 he secured an editorial position on a small Chicago paper, and there he made a connection which led him to Wisconsin as political organizer for the Social Democrats, a reform party, in 1908. That year he married Lilian Steichen, sister of the famous artist-photographer Edward Steichen (of whom the poet pub- lished a pleasing biography in 1929). The young writer, aged thirty, now sought to establish the more settled pattern that befits a well-married man. In 1910 he se- cured appointment as secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee, serving for two years. But he was not interested in a political career. He was a writer, already the master of his trade as a journalist, although his few poems, published here and there in newspapers, did not suggest that he had found a subject or a satisfactory poetic form. He served for a year on the editorial staff of the liberal Milwaukee Leader. The next year, in 1913, he went to Chicago on an editorial engagement, and soon he became illustrious among the writers who were fostering a new literature in that city.

The first of Sandburg’s poems in his characteristic and now-familiar style was “Chicago,” which appeared, in 1914, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. The Chicago Poems of 1916 was followed by Cornhuskers in 1918. That year Sandburg spent some months in Sweden as correspondent for a Chicago newspaper syndicate and returned as editorial writer on the Chicago Daily News, a paper of national promi- nence. He remained with that paper for fifteen years as editorialist, feature writer, and columnist, retiring in 1933 under pressure of his private literary interests.

By 1920, when the “renaissance” of American literature was gaining momen- tum, Sandburg had reached the maturity of his power as a poet. He had twice been recognized by national awards, and his next volume, Smoke and Steel (1920),

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confirmed his position as the poet of the common people confronted with the com- plexities of the new industrial civilization. He began to give frequent public read- ings of his own poems and soon emerged as the foremost minstrel of his time by adding to his programs the performance of American folk songs which he had long been collecting in his journeys about the country. He popularized the folk ballad before the radio became an important medium for his successors. His col- lection The American Songbag (1927; revised and enlarged, 1950), the first popu- lar compilation of the sort, was enriched by his instinct for the genuine and his scholarly knowledge of this field. These qualities passed into his own poems, from Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922) to The People, Yes (1936). The latter is a very knowing arrangement of American folk speech, folkways, and customs, inter- preted in language that sensitively combines the flavor of the original with Sand- burg’s poetic perceptions.

Two other aspects of his career are noteworthy. His books for children began with Rootabaga Stories (1922), to be followed in 1923 by Rootabaga Pigeons and in 1930 by Potato Face and Early Moon. The prose stories in these collections are at a high level, but the poems especially take their place in the distinguished litera- ture of childhood. More important is his Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926), a classic of biography both for its style and for the literary tact which en- abled him to remain faithful to the historical record of Lincoln without losing the American significance of the legendary Lincoln. During the next thirteen years, much of his spare time was devoted to the historical study that prepared him to complete his task in 1939, in the four volumes of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He concentrated his knowledge of the subject in the one-volume Abraham Lincoln of 1954, an authoritative and powerful study.

Sandburg also published several books of a topical nature. He was author or coauthor of three volumes of Lincoln studies. During the Second World War, he published his commentary on events of the time in Storm over the Land (1942) and Home Front Memo (1943). His one novel, Remembrance Rock (1950), is a fictional survey of American history from the colonial period. His considerable in- fluence on the national culture was recognized by the award of many honorary degrees and the accolades of learned and literary academies.

His Complete Poems, published in 1950, gave perspective to an accomplish- ment of great spiritual value to his generation. When he first became known, he was hailed as an interesting and vigorous curiosity, a journalist of poetry, the form of his verse being regarded as at most an external device. Now he can be seen as a truly gifted poet who gave shape and permanence to the phrases, rhythms, and symbols of the American popular idiom while embodying the common idealism of the peo- ple in forms often of notable subtlety. He fulfilled Whitman’s prescription for the poet—“That his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

There is no complete collection of Sandburg’s work. The standard text of the poems is The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, 1950 (revised and expanded, 1970). The earlier volumes have been named in the text above. Always the Young Strangers, 1952, is autobiographical. The Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg, edited by Rebecca West in 1926, contains a good selection to that date and a valuable critical introduction by the editor. Herbert Mitgang edited The Letters of Carl Sandburg, 1968. Margaret Sandburg edited The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg, 1987.

Full biographies are Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography, 1991; and North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works, 1987. Other biographical and critical works include Karl Detzer, Carl Sandburg: A Study in Personality and Background, 1941; Richard Crowder, Carl Sandburg, 1963; Hazell Durnell, The America of Carl Sandburg, 1965; North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: Lincoln of Our Literature, 1969; and Gay Wilson Allen, Carl Sandburg, 1972.

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CARL SANDBURG

A Fence

Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence.

The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.

As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play.

Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.

1913 1916

“A Fence” from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and renewed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

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CARL SANDBURG

Gone

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town. Far off

Everybody loved her. So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold

On a dream she wants. 5 Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went. Nobody knows why she packed her trunk . . . a few old things And is gone,

Gone with her little chin Thrust ahead of her 10 And her soft hair blowing careless From under a wide hat,

Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.

Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick? Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts? 15

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer. Nobody knows where she’s gone.

1916

“Gone” from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and re- newed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

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A Literature of Social and Cultural Challenge

DRAMA BETWEEN THE WARS Between the two world wars American drama became for the first time a widely recognized instrument of national expression. During the first two decades of the century, although theater flourished, it relied principally on long-established dra- matic conventions. Slowly, however, it responded to the new literary climate with infusions from the experimental and critical drama of such European writers as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Quickened by visits of companies from experimental “art” theaters abroad, popular interest grew to support a vital little-theater movement that included Eugene O’Neill as the leading experimental- ist of the Provincetown group in 1916. He soon moved to New York and by 1925 had achieved the dominant stature he retained during the following decade. Con- stantly experimenting with form, he emphasized a content of psychological analy- sis and symbolic representation of character. Later Maxwell Anderson attained a position second to that of O’Neill. His many dramas include social comedies, problem plays, tragedies in classical form, and experiments in poetic drama. The little theaters developed regional writers, while Broadway brought to prominence scores of brilliant new authors and actors and sent an abundance of new plays touring the country. Social and domestic comedy and the problem play attained special brilliance in the hands of Rachel Crothers, Philip Barry, George Kelly, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Thornton Wilder, Sidney Howard, S. N. Behrman, Robert Sherwood, and Lillian Hellman. Social protest marked espe- cially the work of Clifford Odets but was also strong in plays by Elmer Rice, Sid- ney Kingsley, O’Neill, Anderson, Hellman, Barry, Kaufman, and others.

PRIMITIVISM Primitivistic influences on modernism, apparent in art and music as well as in lit- erature, were fed by a burgeoning interest in African art; by a new attention to African American jazz, gospel songs, and blues; and by celebrations of the art, ar- chitecture, oral literature, and material folk culture of the American Indian. Inter- est in the primitive was nurtured as well by an exploding interest in Freudian psychology and Jungian psychology, with their suggestions of hidden motives and universal archetypes; the primitive seemed to offer an especially fruitful field for literary exploration of these concepts. Assuming that basic truths of human be- havior are best observed where conditions are least inhibited by refinements and sophistication, authors interested in character analysis rushed to strip away the veneer of society in search of primitive support for naturalistic or deterministic in- terpretations of life, as O’Neill did, for example, in The Emperor Jones (1921),

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The Hairy Ape (1922), and other plays. Freudian techniques authorized the use of materials that had been taboo, a use dramatically illustrated by James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which reveals the aberrant images in the streams of consciousness of the central characters. O’Neill, Robinson Jeffers, and William Faulkner were the three most successful of many American authors of the period who explored the subconscious as a means of characterization and drew on concepts of primi- tivism to shape their works. Violence, the age declared, is also primitive, and so is the untrammeled expression of sex, as these appeared in earlier works by Norris and London and in succeeding works of Ernest Hemingway, Jeffers, Faulkner, Er- skine Caldwell, and John Steinbeck.

It is not necessary for primitivism to be dark or depressing, though it is often turned so by the ache of nostalgia. The combination of the primitive with the pic- turesque provides much of the charm of balladry and other folk arts, and the pe- riod between the world wars was immensely fruitful for collectors of white and black American folk songs and tales and of Indian legends and lore. Much was deposited on paper and recordings in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., a significant amount was printed in scholarly collections, and a great deal of black traditional music was distributed on “race records” sold in stores catering to African Americans in the twenties and thirties. In its less primitive manifesta- tions, this interest supported the Harlem Renaissance, which itself drew strongly from black tradition, as in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935). Interest in black life supported the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess (1935), based on Du Bose Heyward’s novel Porgy (1925).

American Indians profited from this interest as well, writing works that include Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche’s translations and studies of Omaha and Osage tribal lore, Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half Blood (1927), John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934), D’Arcy McNickle’s Surrounded (1936), and Lynn Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night (1936). Riggs was also the author of the folk drama Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), the source for the hit musical Oklahoma!

THE ROARING TWENTIES AND THE LOST GENERATION To the authors of the 1920s, the stupendous totality and horror of a world war was an inescapable demonstration of the mechanistic theory of history and human life. The human personality was dwarfed as much by the dehumanizing magni- tude of modern events as by the obdurate tendency of natural laws to deny hu- manity a special destiny. Individual identity has been diminishing more intensely ever since.

The authors who faced the world of the twenties had cause for disillusion- ment. After the armistice of November 11, 1918, it became apparent in the bick- ering over the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations that the “war to end war” was unlikely to achieve that goal. Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918 sincerely represented his idealism, yet the European statesmen who accepted his prelimi- nary conditions for a peace conference had already made secret agreements to promote French and British imperialism and to perpetuate the explosive dangers in European life. American isolationism and selfish provinciality contributed to the failure of diplomatic initiatives abroad, and, although historians remain di- vided on the effects of the postwar muddle, the important fact for literary history is the vast disillusionment of American liberals and writers, which coincided with

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the national extravagance, corruption, and social decadence of the so-called Jazz Age, during the 1920s. “You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein is famously reported to have said to the young Hemingway.

Some of the most important literary manifestations of this temper recorded the revolt of youth. The Roaring Twenties and the age of the “flapper” in America are memorialized in the early novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the wit and daring of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, while Hemingway used the Stein quotation as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926), his masterful depiction of an uprooted and directionless expatriate society in Europe. Inheriting the spiritual perturba- tions of an earlier generation, and supported by the journalistic fulminations of H. L. Mencken and others, youth was repelled by the reactionary sham and hypocrisy on every hand and by the “Red scares,” witch-hunting, and Prohibition fostered by 100 percent patriots and the new “puritans.”

The general disenchantment of serious writers after World War I was in- creased by the shocking prevalence of corruption and irresponsibility in both gov- ernment and private enterprise. In the years that followed 1918, the collapse of European economies left the United States as an economic bulwark to the world, but soaring prices, production, and profits fed discontent among labor. The scan- dals of the Harding administration (1920–1923) recalled the Gilded Age at the same time that organized crime, thriving on widespread violations of the unpopu- lar Prohibition laws and the venality of public officials, produced an era of vio- lence, terror, and moral delinquency. The conservative policies of President Coolidge (1923–1929) failed to stem the tide of expansion and inflation, until the stock market crash greeted the Hoover administration. Yet the “lost generation” was not lost to literature, for the decade of 1919 to 1929 produced a dispropor- tionate share of the best American literature of the twentieth century. New au- thors responded to the social and moral confusions in a variety of ways. Those who thronged to the literary colonies of London, Paris, or Rome absorbed invigo- rating European influences into their writing and promoted them at home. The war itself was a vital subject: among older writers, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather both treated it in novels that were overshadowed by the work of the younger generation. Personal experience animated John Dos Passos’s One Man’s Initiation (1917) and Three Soldiers (1921), E. E. Cummings’s Enormous Room (1922), and Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929)—all mixing in different proportions the war’s spiritual, physical, and emotional consequences. T. S. Eliot was already well known when The Waste Land (1922) established his greatness and became widely understood as a dramatic statement of postwar spiritual and moral collapse. Faulkner’s first novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), proved a false start but set him on the way to his true subject, his Mississippi homeland, which he explored in Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury (both 1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). For other novelists, a flawed postwar America proved a fruitful subject. In Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), Sinclair Lewis earned fame as a satirist of bourgeois success and the dull- ness of small-town culture, while in 1925 Theodore Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, Dos Passos, in Manhattan Transfer, and Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, explored in different ways the sorry ends of a materialistic culture.

The psychological probing of personality, continued by such earlier authors as Sherwood Anderson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Cather, was augmented

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especially by the heavy Freudianism of the brilliant O’Neill. Between 1919 and 1928 he developed his powerful vein of spiritual symbolism in the plays Anna Christie, Beyond the Horizon, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, and Strange Interlude. Freudian visions were inescapable also in the poems of Robinson Jeffers, beginning with Tamar (1924) and Roan Stallion (1925), and in the mature novels of Faulkner, beginning with The Sound and the Fury (1929). In the same year, another southerner, Thomas Wolfe, produced in Look Homeward, Angel the first of a sprawling succession of novels that reflected the search of a spiritually homeless generation for a sense of unity within a world that had become too vast, complex, and impersonal.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE An important part of the general literary and cultural renaissance of the twentieth century, the sudden blossoming of African American literature known as the Harlem Renaissance became visible in books such as Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922), published in the same year as Eliot’s Waste Land; Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), in the same year as Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium; and Countee Cullen’s Color (1925), in the same year as Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Heming- way’s In Our Time. Published in 1925 also, Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro provided a focal point for the movement, another perspective on the world of the time to place beside Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s. Other prominent African American writers who emerged in the 1920s include Jessie Fauset and Langston Hughes. Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston, whose books came slightly later, are also associated with the movement. The Harlem Renaissance proved im- mensely important for American literature in general, sharing in the hard times faced by all literature during the Great Depression of the 1930s and reviving in the relative prosperity of the war years of 1941–1945. After the war, the legacy of significant achievement gave inspiration to new generations of writers in the sec- ond half of the twentieth century. Like other cultural flowerings, the Harlem Re- naissance did not spring from forlorn and barren soil. Rather, the cultural climate of the post–World War I years provided fertile ground to nurture seeds planted earlier in the century by African American writers and thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and by the rich cultural and personal histo- ries that had been recorded in print as early as the eighteenth century.

DEPRESSION AND TOTALITARIAN MENACE Hard-won literary, moral, and spiritual assumptions of the 1920s crashed with the stock market in 1929. During the Great Depression that followed, the rise of fascism was manifested in the success of Mussolini and Hitler, while various forms of socialism continued to flex the muscles of an international movement encour- aged by the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the United States, economic distress and ideological unrest prompted a general reappraisal of American values, especially as they contrasted with the increasing pressures of these polar opposites. During this period of turmoil, many writers discovered the depths of their loyalty to tra- ditional American idealism. Archibald MacLeish abandoned his expatriate past; returned to America, where he published New Found Land (1930) and Conquis- tador (1932); and gave himself for a decade to the support of liberal initiatives, in- cluding President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Carl Sandburg, earlier a campaigner for

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reform with the Social Democrats, now confirmed his more celebratory leanings, writing lovingly The People, Yes (1936) and turning to the completion of his mam- moth study of Lincoln. Many writers who continued on paths already begun found their lives and work disrupted in the new circumstances. Most of Fitzger- ald’s best writing was behind him as he turned to Hollywood for income. Faulkner also wrote for films, but when his bank account was fat enough, he returned to Mississippi to write novels. For other established writers, leftist sympathies emerged as a more important part of mainstream literature, as in Dos Passos’s great trilogy U.S.A., or signaled a new engagement in political controversies, as in Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

This was the only period in the United States marked by a formidable pres- ence of proletarian literature and art. Money lost its glamour except in the es- capist worlds of movies and popular fiction, while serious writers recorded the plight of the poor, observed the isolation of the rich, and sermonized. Between rightist and leftist extremes, most writers chose the left in a time rife with propa- ganda for the utopian promise of Marxism. Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1929) and Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930) served as early models for later proletarian novels of immigrant poverty, while the decade ended with Stein- beck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), a reminder of the unprecedented sufferings of masses of formerly independent farm families with deep roots in the American soil, and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), a powerful evocation of black frus- tration and anger. The fate of two novels seems especially emblematic of the time’s uncertainties: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1936), a portrait of Lower East Side poverty, remained largely unread until lifted into critical celebrity in the 1960s as a central work of Jewish American literature; and Meridel Le Sueur’s Girl, com- pleted in 1939 and now prized as a feminist portrayal of the hardships of women, remained unpublished until 1978.

Marxist theory, disseminated by the Daily Worker, the New Masses, and other journals, tinged the nation’s literature but otherwise remained largely academic. Its influence was soon defeated by the hard facts of Marxist history under Joseph Stalin, which rewrote the Soviet socialist ideal as a totalitarian dictatorship distin- guished by the brutality of its purges of all forms of dissent. Elsewhere, totalitar- ian dictatorships suppressed the individual with the ruthless barbarity of moral anarchy: Mussolini grasped power in Italy in 1922; Hitler usurped the German chancellorship for fascism in 1933 and declared the Rome-Berlin axis in 1936; he annexed the Sudetenland, invaded Poland, and silenced Austria in 1938–1939; he led the chorus proclaiming the “master race” while other forms of totalitarianism and militarism rose to power in Spain and Japan. Despite Hemingway’s title, the tolling of these bells was not heard by everyone in America as the world headed inexorably toward the Second World War.

American involvement in the war was gradual before Pearl Harbor, total af- terward. Men and women in the armed services, like James Jones and Norman Mailer, or in defense work, like Harriet Arnow, found in these years material for major works published after the end of hostilities. Hemingway, John Hersey, Stein- beck, Caldwell, and other established writers served their country as war corre- spondents; and two women, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, and Martha Gellhorn, a journalist and novelist, brought to their depictions of frontline com- bat formidable skills already sharply honed in the Depression years. Writers on

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the home front scripted patriotic movies and brought to Broadway a series of top- ical plays, including Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night (1940), Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), Steinbeck’s Moon Is Down (1942), and Maxwell Anderson’s Candle in the Wind (1941), The Eve of Saint Mark (1942), and Storm Operation (1944). Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), on war profi- teering, appeared not long after. In the darkest early days of the war, T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942), written from his experience as a block warden during Lon- don air raids, provided a capstone to his eminent career. As the destruction built toward its end, Saul Bellow, a great-writer-yet-to-be, published his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), the story of a man awaiting his draft notice. Bellow’s pro- tagonist asks, “How should a good man live, what might he do?”—a “how” not very different in its existential thrust from the “why” posed in Little Gidding. As an age passed away, another waited to be born.

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History Literature

1922 T. S. Eliot The Waste Land

Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape

Claude McKay “America”

James Weldon Johnson The Book of Negro Poetry

Teapot Dome scandal 1923 Ellen Glasgow “Jordan’s End”

Robert Frost “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Edna St. Vincent Millay “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”

Wallace Stevens “Bantams in Pine-Woods”

William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow”

E. E. Cummings “Buffalo Bill’s”

Jean Toomer Cane

Calvin Coolidge elected president 1924 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) in a landslide “Heliodora”

The Scopes trial 1925 T. S. Eliot “The Hollow Men”

Amy Lowell “Meeting-House Hill”

Robinson Jeffers “Roan Stallion”

Countee Cullen “Heritage”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway “Big Two-Hearted River”

1926 Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises

Archibald MacLeish “Ars Poetica”

First talking movie, The Jazz Singer 1927 John Crowe Ransom Charles Lindbergh flies the first “The Equilibrists”

successful solo transatlantic flight

Stock market crashes 1929 William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

Thomas Wolfe “An Angel on the Porch”

Katherine Anne Porter “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

1930 Allen Tate “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

Hart Crane The Bridge

John Dos Passos The 42nd Parallel

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History Literature

Scottsboro defendants arrested 1931 Edna St. Vincent Millay “Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink”

F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited”

William Faulkner “That Evening Sun”

Franklin D. Roosevelt elected 1932 Willa Cather president in a landslide victory “Neighbour Rosicky” over Hoover

Prohibition repealed by the 1933 Twenty-first Amendment

First “New Deal” legislation

1934 William Carlos Williams “This Is Just to Say”

Roosevelt initiates second “New 1935 Deal” legislation

Social Security Act passed

The Golden Gate Bridge opens 1937 John Dos Passos U.S.A.

Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God

New Deal ends 1938 John Steinbeck “The Chrysanthemums”

Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact 1939 shocks the world

World War II begins

Germany launches a blitzkrieg 1940 Ernest Hemingway against the Low Countries and France For Whom the Bell Tolls

Richard Wright Native Son

Woody Guthrie “This Land Is Your Land”

On December 7, Japan attacks 1941 Eudora Welty Pearl Harbor; within days of “A Memory” Pearl Harbor, the United States is also at war with Germany and Italy

Battle of Midway 1942 William Faulkner Soviets defend Stalingrad Go Down, Moses The internment of Japanese

Americans

Allied forces invade Sicily 1943

D-Day: Allies invade Normandy 1944 Battle of the Bulge

On April 12, Roosevelt dies 1945 Caroline Gordon U.S. drops atomic bombs on “The Ice House”

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Richard Wright United Nations founded Black Boy Ho Chi Minh unifies Vietnam Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie Czeslaw Milosz

“In Warsaw”

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Edna St. Vincent Millay Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2003

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

R Encouraged by her mother and two sisters, Millay grew up with the idea of herself as a writer; she had her first poem printed in St. Nicholas, a national children’s magazine, when she was twelve. In 1912 she became celebrated because the Lyric Year gave its annual award to an established author, while a number of prominent critics enthusiastically preferred her “Renascence,” a reflective poem of spiritual penetration and lyric beauty.

Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, and grew up in nearby Camden. A family friend supplied the tuition for her to attend first Barnard College and then Vassar College; she graduated in 1917 and the same year published her first collection of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems.

After graduation she moved to Greenwich Village; beautiful, talented, and independent, she seemed the very personification of the woman of the Jazz Age. With irreverence she attacked conventional notions of female behavior in poems that spoke of traveling “back and forth all night on the ferry” or cynically pretended to forget “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed.” A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), her second collection, was followed by the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923). Associated with the Provincetown Players, Millay wrote several plays; among them were Aria da Capo (1920) and The King’s Henchman (1927), which was set to music by Deems Taylor and produced by the Metropolitan Opera Company.

After her 1923 marriage to Eugen Boissevain, she settled at Steepletop, her farm in Austerlitz, New York, where she wrote some of her finest work. Later collections include The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems (1928), Fatal Interview (1931), Wine from These Grapes (1934), and Conversation at Midnight (1937).

Appalled by the storm clouds of fascism forming over Europe, Millay joined Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benét, and many others who called upon writers to oppose the growing tyranny. Although it is not her best work, the writing of this period—including Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939), Make Bright the Arrows (1940), and The Murder of Lidice (1942)—is sincere and often politically effective.

During the last decade of her life, Millay published less in magazines, and no new collections were printed. The Collected Poems, edited by her sister and literary executor Norma Millay, appeared posthumously.

A major portion of her best work may be found in Collected Sonnets, 1941, and Collected Lyrics, 1943. A posthumous “collection of new poems,” edited by Norma Millay, was entitled Mine the Harvest, 1954. Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck, appeared in 1991. The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross Macdougall, appeared in 1952.

Biographical and critical studies are Elizabeth Atkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times, 1936; Vincent Sheean, The Indigo Bunting: A Memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1951; Toby Shafter, Edna St. Vincent Millay: America’s Best-loved Poet, 1957; Miriam Gurko, Restless Spirit: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1962; Norman A. Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1967 (revised, 1982); and Jean Gould, The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1969.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay [What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why]

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EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

[What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why]1

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, 5 And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, 10 Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

1923

© 1923, 1951 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. From Collected Poems. Harper- Collins. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

1. This Millay sonnet here is among the many published in such volumes as The Harp-Weaver (1923), Fatal Interview (1931), and Mine the Harvest (1954). The text is from Collected Poems, 1956.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay [Those Hours When Happy Hours Were My Estate]

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EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

[Those Hours When Happy Hours Were My Estate]

Those hours when happy hours were my estate,— Entailed, as proper, for the next in line, Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine— Those acres, fertile, and the furrow straight, From which the lark would rise—all of my late 5 Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine, But striped with black, the tulip, lawn and vine, Like gardens looked at through an iron gate. Yet not as one who never sojourned there I view the lovely segments of a past 10 I lived with all my senses, well aware That this was perfect, and it would not last: I smell the flower, though vacuum-still the air; I feel its texture, tough the gate is fast.

1954

© 1954, 1982 by Norma Millay Ellis. From Collected Poems. HarperCollins. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

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