(H. Wo. ; X.) United States; Modern Developments.—Modern American poetry, characteristic of the loth century, attempted a complete fusion of romanticism and realism; Carl Sandburg defined it as a "synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." It was experimental and, to a large extent, anti-traditional. It sought to find fresh subject matter and unexploited material as opposed to "literary" conven tions ; it placed its emphasis on the local scene instead of on foreign or mythical regions; it cultivated a native idiom rather than the customary poetic diction. As early as the middle of the 19th century Walt Whitman had invited the Muse to migrate from Greece and Ionia, to "cross out those immensely overpaid ac counts, that matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings," and turn from retrospections, recording proofs of the past, to the American continent— For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Whitman and Emily Dickinson prepared the way for the changes which followed. The pioneer vitalism of the former pro claimed a new force and unity through affirmation of the demo cratic spirit; the puritan mysticism of the latter achieved another kind of vigour which encouraged the use of daring metaphors and audacious turns of phrase. It took time to establish the new forces. The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass was pub lished in 1855 and Whitman prefaced a "deathbed edition" in 1891; Emily Dickinson's first posthumous volume was published in 189o, but no attempt at a biography of Emily Dickinson was written until 1924 and volumes of further unpublished poems kept appearing as late as 1935.
What has been called "the new era in American poetry" mani fested itself suddenly in 1913. Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe" had already struck the social conscience, but there was little to rouse the aesthetic consciousness. A number of small magazines devoted themselves exclusively to poetry ; controversy was in the air; every month another new name was a signal for dispute which augmented the poetic "renaissance." General Wil liam Booth Enters Into Heaven (1913) by Vischel Lindsay (1879– 1931) and The Congo (1914) brought excitement and a curiously syncopated music into verse; Lindsay's Collected Poems (1923) gave America its wide-swinging jazz in terms of literature. A mis sionary and evangelist at heart, Lindsay combined revivalism and ragtime; he preached the Gospel of Beauty through a saxophone. Robert Frost's A Boy's Will appeared in England in 1913, but it was North of Boston (1914) which fully revealed Frost's union of playfulness with profundity and his gift for suggestive under statement. A restrained but distinctive tone of voice rose from all his subsequent work, six volumes of which were assembled in Collected Poems (1939), and showed him to be a farmer by cir cumstance, a philosopher by instinct, and a teacher by experience.
Though his backgrounds were those of New England, his half whimsical, half-sombre lyrics and monologues gave regionalism a universal amplitude and traditionalism a new direction.
The year 1914 marked the rise of free verse and the Imagist movement, a movement which recalled the program of the French Symbolists and which was divided between poetry and propa ganda. Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was its militant champion ; her own craftsmanship, at its best in Selected Poems (1928), pre occupied itself with enamelled images, vivid surfaces, and the swiftly changing contours of the external world.
John Gould Fletcher, another Imagist, intensified motion with emotion; his XXIV Elegies (1935) are a far cry from the unrelated "colour symphonies" of Goblins and Pagodas (1916). "H. D.," who, with Ezra Pound, was one of the first Imagists, revealed a cumulative tensity beneath the stripped technique of her Collected Poems (1925). Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1916) explored the limbo between prose and verse in a set of sociological epitaphs ; its disil lusioned gossip and documentation of the "small town" gave rise to a school of satire and self-criticism, of which Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (192o) was a prose counterpart.
The ranging impulses and far-flung creative energies extended throughout the country and into the mid-twenties. Edwin Arlington Robinson had been writing for years (his concise Children of the Night appeared as early as 1897), but The Man Against the Sky (1916) was the first of his characteristically astringent works to draw an audience which reached great numbers with Tristram (1927) ; his voluminous Collected Poems (1937) appeared two years after his death. Carl Sandburg first blended folk-stuff and fantasy, slang and mysticism in Chicago Poems (1916) ; his The People, Yes (1936) added national significance to the peculiar fusion. Edna St. Vincent Millay's remarkable Renascence (1917) was succeeded by ten volumes which displayed her virtuosity and which, at the best, engagingly com bined the voice of a precocious, eager child and the mind of an ex perienced, disillusioned woman. Her later work evoked varying de grees of enthusiasm ; several critics deprecated the "destructive role of unofficial feminine laureate" which Miss Millay seemed called upon to assume in such collections as Conversation at Midnight (1937) and Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939). Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) be came something of a vogue with Rivers to the Sea (1915), but the graver music of her Dark of the Moon (1926) was almost unnoticed. Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) strengthened the notes sounded by the contemporary singers ; her lyrics and sonnets grew from the adroitness of Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) to the exaltation of the posthu mously published Angels and Earthly Creatures (1929).