John Matthews Manly

“ The following quotation from Poetry (9 [’16] : 51) may [92] serve as a starting-point in discussing Mr. Kreymborg’s qualities: “An insinuating, meddlesome, quizzical, inquiring spirit; sometimes a clown, oftener a wit, now and then a lyric poet ... trips about cheerfully among life’s little incongruities; laughs at you and me and progress and prejudice and dreams; says ‘I told you so!’ with an air, as if after a double somersault in the circus ring; grows wistful, even tender, with emotions always genuine ... always ... as becomes the harlequin-philosopher, entertaining.” ”

“ Not content to present emotions or things or sensations for their own sakes—as is the case with most poetry—this method takes only the most delicately evocative aspects of them, makes of them a keyboard, and plays upon them a music of which the chief characteristic is its elusiveness, its fleetingness, and its richness in the shimmering overtones of hint and suggestion. ”

“ Frost has converted these commonplace experiences into a new field of poetry.
2. Read in succession the poems concerning New England life and decide whether they seem more authentic and more valuable than the others. If so, why?
3. Is Mr. Frost’s realism photographic? Consider in this connection his own statement: “There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean.... To me the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form.” ”

“ Churchill the respect due a sincere, [32] scrupulous, and upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his lights.... The sounds which have reached him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill. ”

“ How far does Mr. Dreiser represent American life? Do you think his work will be for some time the best that we can do in literature?
7. Read Mr. Van Doren’s article (listed below) for suggestion of other points for discussion. The following passage is especially significant:
Not the incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merciless verbosity nor his too frequent interpositions of crude argument can destroy the effect which he produces at his best—that of a noble spirit brooding over a world which in spite of many condemnations he deeply, somberly loves. ”

“ One of the remarkable facts about James’s style is its influence upon the critics who write about him. A close analysis of its qualities—sentence length, the order and placing of the parts of the sentence, punctuation, vocabulary, etc., might bring a more definite understanding of the reasons for this influence.
8. A comparison of the work and qualities of Henry and William James might be made a valuable contribution to criticism.
9. For a student familiar with Europe, a study of the reasons for James’s affinity with Europe and dislike for American life would make an interesting study. ”

“ He must remember, too, that his one concern with the one all-prevalent truth in normal existence is jealously to exclude it from his book.... For “living” is to be conscious of an incessant series of less than momentary sensations, of about equal poignancy, for the most part, and of nearly equal unimportance. ”

“ Study, for example, the following exposition of his theory of art:
For the creative artist must remember that his book is structurally different from life, in that, were there nothing else, his book begins and [27] ends at a definite point, whereas the canons of heredity and religion forbid us to believe that life can ever do anything of the sort. He must remember that his art traces in ancestry from the tribal huntsman telling tales about the cave-fire; and so, strives to emulate not human life, but human speech, with its natural elisions and falsifications. ”

“ Churchill’s success in holding his audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. Never once has Mr. Churchill like a philosopher or a seer, run off alone. ”

“ Anderson’s work is marked and should never be forgotten in judging his work. The conventional element is easily discoverable as patched on, particularly in the long books.
2. To realize the qualities that make some critics regard Mr. Anderson as perhaps our most promising novelist, examples should be noted of the following qualities which he possesses to a striking degree: (1) independence of literary traditions and methods; (2) a keen eye for details; (3) a passionate desire to interpret life; (4) a strong sense of the value of individual lives of little seeming importance. ”

“ Cabell himself at the end of Beyond Life: “It requires a nicer touch than Mr. Cabell’s, to reproduce the atmosphere of the Middle Ages ... the artifice is more apparent than the art....”
4. An interesting study is to isolate the authors for whom Mr. Cabell expresses particular admiration and those for whom he expresses contempt in Beyond Life and to deduce from his attitudes his peculiar literary qualities.
5. Mr. Cabell’s style is notable for the elaboration of its rhythm, its careful avoidance of clichés, its preference for rare, archaic words and its allusiveness. ”

“ He aims to set down “relative truth ... the colors and scents and emotions of existence”; and (2) he is at times as much concerned “with the stuffs as with the stuff of life.”
5. Make a special study of his style: (1) of his use of suggestion; (2) of his choice of words; (3) of his feeling for rhythm. It is true that there is both art and artifice in his methods?
6. In what ways, if any, has he made actual contribution to American literature? ”

“ Although Miss Lowell’s contention that Mr. Robinson is our greatest living poet would be disputed by some critics, her article suggests many points of departure in the study of his very important contribution to American poetry.
2. Divide Mr. Robinson’s work into two groups: (1) poems of which the material is based upon literature; (2) those of which it comes from his own life experience. Is it possible to say now which of these two groups has the best chance of long endurance? Can you decide how far literature has had a good effect upon Mr. ”

“ During the next ten years was a newspaper man in Connecticut, Iowa, and California, a magazine editor in Washington, D. C., and editor for New York book publishers. During the last five years has been traveling in the United States, living from one day to six months in the most diverse places, and motoring from end to end of twenty-six states. ”

“ Hamlin Garland—short-story writer, novelist.
Born on a farm near West Salem, Wisconsin, 1860, of Scotch and New England ancestry. During his boyhood, his father moved first to Iowa, then to Dakota. As a boy, Mr. Garland helped his father with all the hard work of making farmland out of prairie. While still in his teens, he was able to do a man’s work. His schooling was desultory, but he finished the course at Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, then taught, 1882-3. In 1883 he took up a claim in Dakota, but the next year went to Boston and began his career as teacher and writer. ”

“ Art attempts to marshal the shambling procession into trimness, to usurp the rôle of memory and convention in assigning to some of these sensations an especial prominence, and, in the old phrase, to lend perspective to the forest we cannot see because of the trees. Art, as long ago observed my friend Mrs. Kennaston, is an expurgated edition of nature: at art’s touch, too, “the drossy particles fall off and mingle with the dust” (Beyond Life, p. 249) .
In summing up Mr. Cabell’s work, consider the following:
(1) Has he a definite philosophy? ”

“ Something peasantlike in his genius may blind him a little to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling the plain [44] truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, more than he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing.... ”

“ We have many more who have been widely successful in the business of making novels, poems, plays, which cannot rank as literature at all. In choosing from such a large number a list for study, it is our hope that we have not omitted the name of any author who counts as a force in our developing literature ”

“ After leaving college, earned his living in various ways—as advertising manager for a department store, salesman, newspaperman, “safety first” expert. Worked also as district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin and was secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee, 1910-12.
In 1904 he had published a small pamphlet of poems, but his first real appearance before the public was in Poetry, 1914. In the same year he was awarded the Levinson prize for his “Chicago.” In 1918 he shared with Margaret Widdemer (q. v.) the prize of the Poetry Society of America ”

“ If you are familiar with the impressionistic method of painting, work out an analogy between it and Miss Lowell’s word pictures.
7. Study separately her varieties of free verse and polyphonic prose (cf. her study of Paul Fort and the preface to Can Grande’s Castle) . Choose several poems in which you think the free verse form is especially adapted to the content and draw conclusions as to the problems of development of this kind of verse or of its possible influence upon regular metrical forms.
8. Use the following poem by Miss Lowell as a basis for judging her work:
Fragment
What is poetry? ”

“ Howells’s interest in sociological problems add to or lessen the final value of his work?
3. The realism of Howells set a standard for American literature, the effect of which has not yet passed. Study his theories of fiction (Criticism and Fiction, and Literature and Life) and consider the good and bad effects of his work upon the development of the novel.
4. Use the following quotation from Van Wyck Brooks, on Howells’s “panoramic theory” of the novel as a test of his work:
To make a work of art, it is necessary to take a piece out of life and round it off ”

“ In 1897, two years after he had married, he entered Harvard and studied there for two years; but he finally gave up the idea of a degree and turned to various kinds of work, teaching, shoe-making, and newspaper work. From 1900-11, he was farming at Derry, New Hampshire, but with little success. At the same time, he was writing and offering for publication poems which were invariably refused. He likewise taught English at Derry, 1906-11, and psychology at Plymouth, 1911-2.
In 1912, he sold his farm and with his wife and four children went to England. ”

“ The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to “grow” with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. ”

“ If she had a little less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the societies about which she writes.... The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements. ”

“ The Suggestions for Reading given in the case of the more important authors are intended for students who need and desire guidance. It is our hope that these hints and questions may lead to discussion and differences of opinion, for dissent is the guidepost to truth. ”

“ Wharton’s power has lain in the ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility. ”

“ For complete bibliography, see Who’s Who in America.
Mrs. Richard Aldington (Hilda Doolittle, “H. D.”) —poet.
Born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1886. Studied at Bryn Mawr, 1904-5, but ill health compelled her to give up college work. In 1911, she went abroad and remained there. In 1913, she married Richard Aldington, the English poet (cf. Manly and Rickert, Contemporary British Poetry) .
“H. D.’s” work is commonly regarded as the most perfect embodiment of the Imagist theory. ”

“ James Oppenheim—novelist, short-story writer, poet.
Born at St. Paul, Minnesota, 1882. Two years later his family moved to New York, where he has lived ever since. Special student at Columbia, 1901-3. Has done settlement work, as assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement. Superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, 1904-7. In 1916-7 edited the magazine, The Seven Arts (cf. Poetry, 9 [’16-’17] : 214) . ”

“ Consider especially her presentation of “images.” How far do these seem to be derived from direct experience? Test them by your own experience. What principles seem to determine her choice of details? Which sense impressions—sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—does she most frequently and successfully suggest? Note instances where her figures of speech sharpen the imagery and others where they seem to distort it. In what ways is the influence of Keats perceptible in her work? [100]
5. It is worth while to make special study of the historical imagery of the poems in Can Grande’s Castle. ”