worship of material success there is a stirring of the ideal; and Mr. Sandburg is, as it were, a mouthpiece for this inarticulate idealism to make itself heard.

One of the best poems in his new book is a description of a Middle Western town whose sins are 'neither scarlet nor crimson' but a convict gray, a dishwater drab.' This town, the poet continues, is

a spot on the map

And the passenger trains stop there
And the factory smokestacks smoke
And the grocery stores are open Saturday nights
And the streets are free for citizens who vote
And inhabitants counted in the census.
Saturday night is the big night.

and then:

Main street there runs through the middle of the town,

And there is a dirty postoffice
And a dirty city hall

And a dirty railroad station..

Not an inspiring home for poetry, one feels. Mr. Sandburg sends into it a 'loafer,' who says some harsh things of the town, and concludes:

you ain't in a class by yourself, I seen you before in a lot of places. If you are nuts America is nuts.

To smile over that as quaint or amusing is to miss its significance. This criticism from Mr. Sandburg, who is on the whole too easy-going, too easily satisfied with mere activity, is as significant as Arnold's 'By the Ilyssus there was no Wragg.' It is a recognition of an essential spiritual truth: mere material prosperity is not enough. "To blaspheme wealth' needs courage in any modern community; it needs special courage in an Anglo-Saxon country. But the significance of this is not that it comes from an exceptional and educated person - there are plenty such in the United States

but that Mr. Sandburg utters it as a feeling of the people.

These moments of dissatisfaction are rare and brief; more often we find Mr. Sandburg 'celebrating' the vigor, usefulness, and supremacy of American

commerce:

Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,
Eats and swears from a dirty face.
Omaha works to get the world a breakfast.

or again he runs off on one of those excited catalogues, dear to Walt Whitman:

Fire and wind wash at the slag,

Box-cars, clocks, steam-shovels, churns, pistons, boilers, scissors

Oh, the sleeping slag from the mountains, the slag-heavy pig-iron will go down many roads. Men will stab and shoot with it, and make butter and tunnel rivers, and mow hay in swaths, and slit hogs and skin beeves, and steer airplanes across North America, Europe, Asia, round the world.

We will not stay to discuss the merits of these lines but point out that they do explain Mr. Sandburg's milieu; he has used the materials which he found at hand. It would be unjust to omit saying that he has absorbed some of the natural beauty of his country, but he has a kind of pre-determination to insist on the ugly, he materialistic side of his subject. At his best, he uses this natural beauty to point a contrast; more frequently it is a mere reference, imperfectly 'fused' by his talent. There is an absence of meditation in these poems which gives them an air of incompleteness. Like the French Cubists, Mr. Sandburg tries 'to confound himself with life.'

No writer is without a literary tradition or literary influences of some sort, because no one writes without previously reading. The tradition of Mr. Sandburg is Whitman, journalism, and to a slighter extent modern vers libre poets, just as Whitman's tradition was journalism and prose translations of

epic poetry. The value of a tradition is of course invaluable to the artist; at its best it is a sure foundation to build on, at its worst something to rebel against. We Europeans have an immense, an august tradition; even as Englishmen we have a considerable tradition. And since most Americans speak English and are descended from Europeans they also inherit our tradition. But, following Whitman, many American poets choose deliberately to ignore it, to forfeit its great benefits. Why? Whitman has explained his views in his prose works, but we do not need to go to them for an answer. These American poets desire their writings to possess above everything the qualities of vitality, novelty, and Americanism. Above all they wish to produce work which is emphatically American. They argue, like Whitman, that they are not 'out' to follow any tradition, however great and splendid, but to create one, the tradition of America. They have therefore a distrust, almost a hatred, of the past and the beauty it created. Here is an interesting example from Smoke and Steel.

BRONZES

They ask me to handle bronzes
Kept by children in China
Three thousand years

Since their fathers

Took fire and molds and hammers And made them.

The Ming, the Chou,
And other dynasties,

Out, gone, reckoned in ciphers,
Dynasties dressed

In old gold and old yellow
They saw these.

Let the wheels

Of three thousand years
Turn, turn, turn on.

Let one poet then
(One will be enough)
Handle these bronzes
And mention the dynasties
And pass them along.

VOL. 21-NO. 1960

What a perverse misunderstanding, we are tempted to exclaim, what a curious misapprehension of beauty, what a rejection of excellence! What an abyss between that and Renan's prayer on the Acropolis!

After the quotations made, no further example of Mr. Sandburg's debt to Whitman is needed. It is clear throughout his pages, even to the extent of his using phrases from Leaves of Grass-'hairy, hankering.' More disturbing than Whitman is the journalism in Mr. Sandburg's style. We are not referring to his use of slang, his 'crummy hobos' and 'hoodlums' and 'lousy doughboys,' which are probably due to an overstrained sense of loyalty to one's own time, but to the tone of his poems, which so often read like a piece of newspaper writing. Look at the journalistic facetiousness in this:

Let me count reminiscences like money; let me count picnics, glad rags, and the great bad manners of the Carlovingians breaking fresh eggs in the copper pans of their proud uncles.

Always that irritation with the past, that opposition of the live dog to the dead lion, that flattery of a living mediocrity. But there is the essence of Mr. Sandburg's writing: vitality, novelty, Americanism, at all costs. What does it matter (he seems to say) that the Parthenon is the supreme expression of a supreme wisdom, that Shakespeare is the supreme poet of tragedy and comedy, that anything supremely excellent and beautiful has been created by the past? The Parthenon is a ruin; Shakespeare is dust; excellence and beauty- what are they? Cowley said that there was no need to sing new songs but to say the old. These American poets would violently disagree. They are convinced that life, modern life, the 'now' alone is important; that vitality, energy, truth to modern life, to the outward phe

nomena of modern life, are all that is as ked of the poet.

How far have they succeeded in this? Have they achieved novelty, vitality, and truth to life? In the case of Mr. Sandburg the answer is that to a great extent he has. He has introduced themes which have seldom, perhaps never, been treated before. There is an impressive display of energy in Smoke and Steel. His poems are true to a certain kind of life, they are undoubtedly American. They do succeed, then, in doing what they set out to do, but whether this in itself constitutes a high and right art is another question. Yet we ought to be

sympathetic, as open-minded as possible to this kind of writing, remembering that one danger to poetry is always that it may become too bookish, preoccupied with formalities and dignities, and too little stirred by the rough energies of life. Mr. Yeats has said that modern poetry has two ways before it, one of increasing refinement and one among the market carts.' Mr. Sandburg has chosen the way 'among the market carts,' and we are wrong if we refuse to accept what he has to give us. Yet, though European criticism must recognize these experiments and strive to understand them, European poetry may well reject them.

IN England the imaginative wayfarer will travel with poets for company, whereas in Ireland he will have kings and battles. In England one talks of Shakespeare or Wordsworth country, or one may turn to another art and discover Constable country or Old Crome country or Morland villages. The poets and the artists have written their names large on the fair English landscapes. In Ireland it will be O'Neill country or O'Donnell country or the Desmond country; or one will look straight ahead and see a battlefield, the Pass of the Curlew, or the Yellow Ford, or some other scene of a mighty fight.

The Americans, those passionate pilgrims, whose tracking of memories and associations must have a worthier

foundation than merely 'wanting to know,' used to track down the haunts of English men of letters and artists, kings and queens, councillors, and nobles, as they tracked the nightingale through his capricious and brief appearances. It is conceivable that scenery would not mean much to an American without association, not, at least, the garden scenery of England. I remember once in my intolerant youth to have taken a walk with an American poet through Middlesex lanes and fields, now, alas, covered with little red brick houses and Cockney parks, which latter, from the prevalence of the poplar, attain a Noah'sArk-like expression. Those fields were the haunts of many larks which have flown farther, yet not too far, and

there the last nightingale sang his heart-breaking song in a May night more than a quarter of a century ago. One would have thought that an American poet would have been delighted and satisfied with so many ruralities sweeping to the very skirts of London. I was particularly proud of those fields, as though I owned them for all time. The American poet wanted history and biography thrown in. He was sure that every knoll, every building, every rood of earth, had its story. Well, doubtless he was right. Those fields were the Bishop of London's swine-forest in Alfred's days; and in the twentieth century the swine farms still remain, and the black pigs still run the fields for acorns under the twisted oaks, as they did in Alfred's time. Also there is a little House of God, at the heart of the fields, where people have prayed since the eleventh century, a little church, pressed down and small with the weight of years, as though Time leaned heavily upon it. Such things I refused to impart to my American poet. An Englishman would have told him to the extent of his knowledge. I know people of my own race who would have invented where they did not know. Through my perversity he went away empty, longing to be full.

Near London it is not so easy to hear the Spirit of Place, or, perhaps, it is never quiet enough. One might hear her if one came at nightfall. She is a shy Spirit. If she is urban it is in quiet streets and cloisters, old houses, old churches, and gardens. Trams and telephones and motor-buses and motorcars sent her fleeing, like her sisters, the Dryads and Hamadryads, from those marred woods and violated waters. Nowadays even the air is closed against her.

But she is still in England, anywhere but in the staring and dusty new

towns and streets. She is in English villages and old towns. There are fields under Malvern Hills Shakespeare country where she moves in the twilight; such a gentle Spirit; where, if you put your ear to the earth you can hear the very heart of England beating. These are the battlegrounds of the Wars of the Roses. To yonder old house Margaret of Anjou brought her great spirit, that never trailed its wings in the dust, after the Battle of Tewkesbury. The Spirit has nothing to whisper of

Old, unhappy, far off things
And battles long ago.

She does not even say to you her invitation to sit and tell sad stories of the death of kings, although the house that sheltered Margaret of Anjou has its association with another tragic and noble lady, for the quilt of scarlet silk, at which Catherine of Aragon worked with her ladies, reposes there in the queen's traveling trunk, with its royal monogram in tiny gilt nails.

In a May, ten years ago, the Spirit also told of quiet lives and innocent prosperities. The Worcestershire hedges were white with a record May, the new, satin-shining grass had a gaiety of blue dotted all over its grassgreen, and overhead the boughs were out in their first pale beauty. Houses and men had fitted into the country and become part of it, as they do not near cities. The very tramps who were making their ablutions, or still abed, or breakfasting, on sheets and napkins of finest green silk, diapered with white of starwort and vivid blue of speedwell, were cordial and pleasant creatures, as they smiled a goodmorrow. They were, to the life, Shakespeare's merry rogues, and the songs they trolled might have been the songs of Autolycus. There was no stain on that country. If terrible

things had happened there the Spirit of Place had forgotten them or had not known..

It is a humiliating reflection that man, when he comes in his numbers, defiles and defaces, and makes ugly more than the wild beast. One has but to find his trail on any green place. The orange-peels, the dirty and torn newspapers, the old boots, the broken crockery and utensils, have power to destroy beauty and peace and banish the Spirit of Place. When he stretches out a hand over what once was countryside, how depressing are his little houses, his clinker paths, in fields where the mole delved industriously from dawn to dark, where the lark climbed a thousand winding stairs into Heaven. Not that the lark is beyond becoming urban. He still springs heaven-high from the golf-links, which say to the most ungarden-like gardensuburb: 'So far shalt thou go and no farther.'

Let us leave Malvern with its gentleness behind and turn to Kent, where the Spirit of Place is very strong. One has but to know and love the country round about Penshurst to realize Sir Philip Sidney. This golden and gracious country made him and the Earl of Surrey and Raleigh, and all that galaxy of most splendid singing birds, who were also soldiers and courtiers of the Elizabethan days. Other influences there are in that place. John Wesley, who came to reform the Church of England, not to make a secession, has written his name on the landscape. There is Little Boundes, where he used to visit the Countess of Huntingdon, from whence he carried on that correspondence with Mrs. Delany, the piety of which has sometimes a demure air of flirtation. Over against Little Boundes, across the valley, is a house of the wicked Restoration beauty, who held her lover's

horse while he fought with and killed her husband. A field there is called Bloodshots to this day, and the steep way down into the valley is eerie. Some children, finding themselves there with their governess of a summer day long ago, entirely unconscious of the evil memories of the place a peculiarly sinister murder had been committed there some years earlier were driven back to the high road by something that was like an emanation of evil.

Beauty makes patriots and heroes as well as poets and painters and soldiers and fine gentlemen. In mountainous countries there are ardent patriots.

The Spirit of Place in Ireland is forlorn: she is a banshee. Find yourself in innocent Irish fields at twilight, or perhaps in broad daylight, and you will suddenly feel afraid and sorrowful. The Spirit of Place is forlorn and the fields are haunted. The fairies have long ago trooped out of England because, according to the old Bishoppoet

the fairies

Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Marias,
Their dances were procession.
But since of late Elizabeth,

And later James, came in,
They have not danced on any heath
As in the time hath been.

The last fairies in England, one
imagines, must have whispered to
Herrick. Now, when they come to
England, they are brought by an
Irishman, Yeats, or Allingham, or
Dicky Doyle.

Allingham caught the very note of the loneliness of Irish fields, even at midday, with his

Little cowboy, what have you heard

Up on the lonesome rath's green mound. Only the plaintive yellow bird Piping to sultry fields around.