Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/80

62 for Riley's enormous vogue. Though there are capacities in the American mind and character that he does not appeal to, it is undeniable that he appeals urgently to the normal thoughts and feelings of the divine average.

This is not true of the last of the greater Western poets who are no longer living—William Vaughn Moody. His small, discriminating audience regarded him as a poet of the highest promise, whose early death was a public loss. Wholly without the sectional point of view, he was also free from the restrictions in vision characteristic of certain decades in American life. He was neither Middle Western nor late Victorian, but American and modern.

Born, like Riley, in Indiana, in 1869,—at the beginning of an era of industrial development and clearer national consciousness,—the son of a steamboat captain, with English, French, and German strains in his blood, and educated in a New England college, Moody naturally attained a larger outlook on life than most of the poets of the half century. After graduating from Harvard, he stayed in Cambridge for two years, and then, in 1895, returned to the Middle West as instructor in English in the University of Chicago. Although conscientious as a teacher, he chafed at the routine,—measuring time in terms of committee meetings and quantities of "themes,"—and at his environment, finding himself, he soon reported, "fanatically homesick for civilization," though it is doubtful whether he could have found a congenial post as a teacher anywhere in the "booming" America of his day. Fond of outdoor activity, he found relief in swimming, bicycling, and walking in this country and abroad, from Arizona to Greece. He was a vigorously sensuous, full-blooded, ruddy-faced, youthful poet, intensely curious of experience, ardently devoted to "It," his term for "the sum total of all that is beautiful and worthy of loyalty in the world"—chief of all, poetry as an expression of life. The decisions of his life prove the sincerity of this devotion. Achieving a sudden success through his drama The Great Divide, he was besieged by publishers who offered him as much as fifty thousand dollars for the play in the form of a novel; but he did not believe in "novelization" and preferred to follow his own artistic bent. So, too, after