Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/116

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse

URING my recent travels through our scenic West, I was moved to wonder what would be the ultimate effect upon our art and literature of those great heights and depths and spaces, those clear skies and living waters, those colors incredible and magnificent. For, in spite of a few pioneers, we have not yet taken possession of our inheritance, entered into our kingdom.

Mark Twain was the greatest of our continental adventurers, of course. His Life on the Mississippi is an epic of the great river which puts it on the map of art even as the Iliad placed Troy there, and Don Quixote Spain. With this book American literature crossed the Mississippi. But although its author, and Bret Harte and Mary Austin and other writers of tales, John Muir and other essayists, and to a far less degree a few poets have given us episodic glimpses into the vast region beyond, revealed something of its drama and poetry and mystery, they have as yet but skirted the edges of the new domain.

But some day American poets will become aware of all this magnificence of nature, as English poets have been aware of the sea, and their art will be inspired to a new richness, a new spaciousness. Of course, the long eastward gazing of our artists—their obstinate residence in the Atlantic states, their more obstinate preoccupation with the arts and liter-