Humane History

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN POETRY, 1900--1940 (524 pp.)--Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska--Harcourf, Brace ($4).

Poetry's modern apologists have cried up modern poetry as such a dark art that many an intelligent reader has given it up as sense-making literature, written by human beings for human beings. In this book, Poets Gregory and Zaturenska (Mrs. Gregory) do a good deal to bring the 20th Century Pegasus back to earth. They contend that U.S. poetry in this century, gaming "in the virility and'brilliance of its speech," has become the best in the English-speaking world.

In 1900 such a claim could never have been made. The Gregorys tell with sympathetic amusement of the doings of highflown and boyish spirits like Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, singers of "the open road," and the feeble graces of others like Thomas Bailey Aldrich. But they recognize the "serenity, grace and lightness" of George Santayana's best verse, and properly value the authentic American nostalgia expressed by James Whitcomb Riley.

The first U.S. poet of the century to succeed in growing up, say the Gregorys, was Edwin Arlington Robinson. The Gregorys suggest parallels between Robinson's keen-witted accomplishment and that of Henry James: "Both men separately held in respect the progress of self-realization. ..." The authors esteem Robinson's verse, which they consider as good as Thomas Hardy's, and Robert Frost's "Horatian serenity," as much as Ezra Pound & Co. and the Midwestern awakenings of Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters.

The brightest decade, the '20s, makes the best section of the book. Modeling their work on Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets, the Gregorys have included not only biographical information but legends and anecdotes. Their most valuable device, however, is the use of old English poetry to show that the "new" is part of one great literature. Example: they quote the following lines by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the 17th Century London wit:

Yet hugg'd me close, and, with a Sigh, did say,

Once more, my Dear, once more, Et

Caetera.

along with the following by E. E. Cummings, wit of the '20s:

my sweet old etcetera

aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what

is more did tell you just

what everybody was fighting

for my self etcetera lay quietly (dreaming,

et

cetera, of

Your smile

eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

Horace Gregory (46), has been a practicing poet and critic for 20 years and has taught for the last twelve years at Sarah Lawrence College. Russian-born Marya Zaturenska won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for her book of poems, Cold Morning Sky. The Mandarin prose of the Gregorys sometimes gets out of hand, running to dreamy convolutions, their urbanity sometimes permits open enjoyment of an innuendo none too polite; their estimates of one or two poets, notably John Gould Fletcher, are horrifyingly kind, and of one or two others, notably Laura Riding, apparently insensible. But in the main, the chapters of this book are civilized, clear, usefully illustrated and deeply meditated.

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