n their shelves. But let us grant for the sake of argument
that any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect
poetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recall
the situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic
appreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, and
Whitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment,
and the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was the
rare genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-day
the most popular of our poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was in
his prime. Thus it appears that public appreciation, and not creative
power, was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of the
Parnassian hill. Not until then did the poet come "tumbling after."

Moreover, in the light of modern aesthetic psychology, this seems the
more natural order of events. It takes two to make a work of art: one
to produce, one to appreciate. The creative appreciator is a
correlative of all artistic expression. It is almost impossible for
the artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphere
exhaled by the ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the callous, or
the actively hostile. It follows that the demand for poetry is created
no more by the supply than the supply is created by the demand. Thus
the general indifference to this one department of American art was
_not_ primarily caused by the degenerating supply.

The decline and fall of our poetic empire have yet other Gibbons who
say that our civilization suddenly changed from the country to the
urban type, and that our love of poetry began to disappear
simultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and the
mushroom growth of the large cities. So far I agree; but not with
their reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities are
such dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymous
only with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germans
call the "heaven-scratcher," with elevated railways, "sand hogs,"
whirring factories, and alleys reeking with the so-called "dregs" of
Europe. They claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar creed of the
modern city is epitomized by such things as a certain signboard in New
York, which offers a typically neo-urban solution of the old problem,
"What is art?"
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| PARAGON PANTS |
| AR