Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/178

 processes of thought and the shades of feeling. Since the gait and total effect of any work in these provincial idioms is readily distinguishable from that of the Anglo-Irish, Lancashire, or other provincial dramatists, we have manifestly several American styles which are more than personal styles.

Interest in these provincial styles has, beyond spelling and vocabulary, affected the character of what, for the moment, we may call "Standard American." Nothing perhaps in our literature is more remarkable than the immense abundance of our studies in "local color," the work of innumerable novelists and short-story writers. An impulse passes from them to the poets, making for a new intimacy of expression. If, eliminating prose writers who spell like Joel Chandler Harris and poets who spell like James Whitcomb Riley, we examine writers who employ standard American spelling, like Mr. Frost and Mr. Robinson, we find styles which have been formed in part by listening to the infrequent slow speech and harkening to the cautious, difficult, inexpressive soul of the New England farmer. "Something there is which does not love a wall:" that is the way the farmer would take hold of the thought; and that is about as far as he would get with it. Poets who listen to the calliope, the saxophone, and the Chicago Tribune betray still other subtleties of the national soul, into which I cannot now enter.

I should like to dwell on the fork in the stylistic