Collected Poems
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1923, Small 8vo. xviii +390 pp. $3.50 (Large paper dition, •37.50).
THE ultimate answer to the question, why should any contemporary writer be ‘collected,’ would deal with the ultimate value of his works, and there can scarcely be any reviewer so foolish as to compete with time, the final judge in all such matters. It can only be wise or desirable to say what sort of appearance has been encountered, as if one had returned home to describe a man seen on the street.
What are the lineaments, what the mask that Mr. Lindsay displays in this collection? It is more subtle than the loud shouting of much of his work would lead you to expect. Perhaps he is like Whitman in this-that his writing can never gain as wide a response as the simply rimed and metred verses of Poe or Housman, It has been the fate of democratic poets who write barbaric yawps about democratic conceptions to appeal largely to those who have that twist of sophistication which is called culture. It may take that sort of person to find the swing of emotion in jagged lines which catalogue not ships but the states of this Union, or to taste the objective perfection of such a piece as ‘Simon Legree A Negro Sermon.'
In spite of this hint of complication, the strongest characteristic in this book is a sort of innocence and ungainliness, as if the wrists of this poetry stuck out of its sleeves and felt a certain difficulty in the disposition of its hands and feet — at its best an attractive, wistful, and unconscious ungainlines, at its worst a sprawling which makes the verses strained and diffuse.
In any poet’s collected work there is more bad poetry than good. It is surprising that there is not more bad in this collection, considering that Mr. Lindsay is more interested in preaching beauty than in creating it. He says himself in his amusing preface. ‘Adventures While Singing These Songs,’ that this whole book is ‘a weapon in a strenuous battlefield.’ He also talks of dancing to poetry, hieroglyphics, drawing, and all sorts of extraneous folly. The wonder is that there is so much pungency, so much keen and subtle thought mixed in with braggart, empty, and awkward noises.
But let them be braggart or awkward as they will, the fact remains that only the stiff-necked or stiff-brained can fail to enjoy these strings of words. The very cautious may take them as the strangest of strange phenomena; the classical may take them as a study of modern tendency a poor but harmless point of view; some may smile on them as the antics of a resident of Springfield, Illinois; some may blandly wonder as to what it is all about; but surely anyone can get humor out of it, both the humor of laughing at the poet and with him.
And among all the arrows that Mr. Lindsay has shot at random targets, some of them have hit the mark of distinction, and when they have hit that mark they stick and quiver there.
H. PHELPS PUTNAM.
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