Page:Trails sunward (IA trailssunward00ricerich).pdf/13



Never has poetry tried so hard to be prose as at the present time in America. Weary of being banned to the limbo of the inconspicuous, it has adopted, via Paris, some illegitimate offspring of Whitman's ideas, and thus "ismed" and calling itself the "new poetry," it whacks all that has hitherto been held as making for the poetic.

To the experienced these new "isms" are but aspects of a general and unrestrained reaction toward realism. Even in form this is so. Their broken prose rhythms, suitable perhaps to the unaccented French tongue, but lacking the deep music of such true free verse as Whitman has immortalized, makes us aware of the fact that "free verse realism" is the name which is perhaps most appropriate to them all.