Tendencies in Modern Poetry Author:Amy Lowell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EDGAR LEE MASTERS CARL SANDBURG Mr. Masters is the author of a number of books, but one has made his fame; and it seems probable that only one will outlive... more » the destructive work of time. But this one is so remarkable that it may very well come to be considered among the great books of American literature. I refer, of course, to "The Spoon River Anthology." I think it is not too much to say that no book, in the memory of the present generation, has had such a general effect upon the reading community as has this. Every one who reads at all has read it. Its admirers are not confined to those who like poetry, people who have never cared for a poem before are enthusiastic over "Spoon River," while professed poetry lovers stand, some aghast and some delighted, but all interested and amazed. Even its enemies admit it to be extraordinary. It has been characterized as an American "Comddie Humaine," but I think Dostoevsky in vers libre would be more accurate. Mr. Masters'habit of thought is more akin to the Russian than to the French. In fact, Mr. Masters is in some ways closer to the Swede, August Strindberg, than to any other modern writer. Of course, analogies of this kind must not be pushed too far. If Mr. Masters resembles Balzac in the fecundity he shows in inventing characters and lives to fit them, he is also like Strindberg in showing only a narrow stratum of society. If he is like Balzac in confining his mise en scene in a small compass, he is again like Strindberg in being primarily interested in one important phase of life — that of sex. Balzac was no poet, but he realized that man is impelled by many motives; in Strindberg, the actions of the characters are all dependent upon their sex impulses. Mr. Masters is a poet, but he too sees life through the medium of sex. Per...« less