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found to bring it back to life. It is Nature's stern law that all things which live must die. Forms of literature are no exception.

There is only one safe touchstone in life and art: The inner voice of Self, unmarred by this theory or that theory. It is true, it often leads to tragedy. But there is a tragic element in Nature, in life, which none may escape. It is the one thing before which we must bend our heads in resignation. The idea that another's inner voice, whether of an age or an individual, is more important than our own reduces itself to an absurdity under the analysis of common sense. In fact, no man really follows. Neither men nor theories. Take even such movements as religion, where the individual who founds it becomes deified and his teachings become definite, concrete. Even there the observer will notice that there are as many forms of the particular religion as there are followers. For no man is capable, no matter how hard he tries, to annihilate himself.

Of the whole vast welter of our day, one definite thing emerges: All values are being re-evaluated. Poetry is only one of them and cannot escape re-evaluation. The young poets assure us that they are as profoundly impressed with the work of the masters as the college professors. But they cannot shut their eyes to the fact that these works speak of a time and of men long since dead. Their forms and their manner of expression are marvelously beautiful, but they do not give utterance to the throbbing life within us; to our needs, our problems, our longings. Imitated by us, these beauties become the beauties of the defunct body in the coffin.

Their primary concern is not this rhythm or that rhythm, but

the steeled sight,

The obstinacy of vision that melts the hard edge of things like compressed fire.

And affords them a peep at reality. The vast majority of us live in a world of illusion, which, through the instrumentality of metaphysics, religion, politics, and art has been rendered far more powerful than the real world. The young poets, together with many other artists and thinkers, are laboring to brush away all the cobwebs of illusion. The theory of the metaphysician that this world is too stern and life too stony at the core to be endured without illusion, is challenged by them. Anyway, they want a look at it. If they find life too stony, they will spin illusions. But not before they have tried to see it as it is.

And so we find Edgar Lee Masters not afraid to exclaim:

There is a joke of cosmic size!

The urge of nature that made a man

Evolve from his brain a spiritual life—

The very same brain with which the ape and the wolf

Get food and shelter and procreate themselves.

Nature has man do this

In a world where she gives him nothing to do

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But get food and shelter and procreate himself.

The young poets insist upon taking in all life. They declare that the renters of the front pew are not the only ones worthy of finding. their emotions in song. The great, the all-embracing fact is for one to be alive. Whether he is socially this or that is of little consequence. And so we find Daisy Fraser, the sinning sister of Spoon River, ascending to heaven on the thought that she was

Never taken before Justice Arnett

Without contributing ten dollars and cost

To the school fund of Spoon River.

They insist on singing the song of the new day, no matter what its activities. You find them in the front ranks of the army fighting for social justice; and you find them jibing at some local celebrity.

I belong to the church.

And to the party of prohibition;

And the villagers thought I died of eating watermelon.

The truth is I had cirrhosis of the liver.

For every noon for thirty years

I slipped behind the prescription partition

In Trainor's drug store

And poured out a generous drink

From the bottle marked

"Spiritus frumenti."

They are indifferent to the fact that they are taken for a wicked lot by the professors. They do not mind the stout stick of the critic, nor the condescending smile of the school ma'am. They point to the fact that every new movement is met with threats, derision, and even violence. At the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Lear, the old guards were inweighing against the drama; which is perhaps the most respected form of composition of our day. The Carnegies of Elizabethan England were bequeathing money on libraries on the stipulation that "play-books" be excluded from them.

To the charge of a lack of technique, they reply that their accusers are wrong. The fact that their poetry has none of the tum-titum-tums of the old poetry does not mean it has no form. It has as definite a technique as the rhymed verse has. Only we have not yet gotten used to its rhythm. The laws of the new form have been definitely established upon laboratory experimentation. Amy Lowell, perhaps the greatest of its exponents, tells us: "It is non-syllabic,

. . the stress is one of chief accent only, with many or few syllables between, and the time unit is from one chief accent to another, a group of such time units making up the curve of the cadences."

At first blush it would seem that this is only a quarrel among the poets and need not concern the layman. The truth is that the quarrel reaches much further. All of us are concerned in it. For one thing, the reason the vast majority of mankind do not read poetry is partly due to the fact that it does not concern them. Homer's song does not touch their lives. Milton was read more than praised by his age, because his Paradise Lost is the struggle of the Puritan age. Today he is praised more than read because we have to admit. that he is a great poet. But Puritanism is no longer the ruling force of life of the majority of us. For those for whom it still is Paradise Lost is still the book, much read and talked about.

The young poets believe that they can bring poetry back to its ancient prestige by making it utter the joys and woes of the day.

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