The strain of lyrical poetry was swelled by Leonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Genevieve Taggard, Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Dorothy Parker, whose wry flippancies were collected in Not So Deep as a Well (1936). A still more subtle music was registered in Conrad Aiken's Selected Poems (1929) ; in (or in spite of) the typographical oddities of E. E. Cummings; and in the modern ballads of William Rose Benet and Stephen Vincent Benet, whose John Brown's Body (1928) was panoramic in scope and epic in effect. Efforts to sound the "realistic" implications of the American scene were made by Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, and the pioneering William Carlos Williams, whose Complete Collected Poems 5906-5938 were applauded alike by radicals and conservatives. Robinson Jeffers unleashed a violent, and often uncontrolled, power in a series of volumes from Roan Stallion (1926) to Such Counsels Toss Gave to Me (1938). Archibald MacLeish shaped words into surprisingly suspended cadences in Poems 1924 fitted them into a new type of poetic drama in Panic (1935), put them to work on the radio and on the sound-track in Land of the Free and Air Raid (1938).
A definite and seemingly determined attempt to join traditional metaphysical poetry with indigenous accents was expressed by a group calling itself "The Fugitives"; its leading exponents were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren.
Their verse was alternately teasing and tortuous ; the very richness of their allusive material made it difficult. Equally fascinating to the student and equally forbidding to the average reader were the abstract elegances of Wallace Stevens, the verbal legerdemain of Hart Crane, the crowded imagery,of Horace Gregory, and the erudite intricacies of two celebrated expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Eliot's work was the most considerable ; it ranged from the baffled frustration of Prufrock and Other Poems (1917) through the drought and dis integration of The Waste Land (1922) to the desperate faith of Eliot's later religious plays and essays. Finally there were the prodigies, notably Nathalia Crane, whose The Janitor's Boy (1924) was pub lished when its author was not quite eleven; George Dillon, who won prizes in his teens and whose Boy in the Wind (1927) was pub lished in his twenty-first year ; and Merrill Moore, a psychiatrist, who wrote many of his poems in shorthand, and whose third volume, starkly entitled M (1938), contained i,000 autobiographical sonnets.
(L. UN.)