Humanism and America

[55] Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P. Tristram Coffin in New England.

[56] From the poem “Earth,” in Dust and Light, 1919, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

[57] Mr. Robinson, of course, had been publishing poetry for nearly twenty years before the new movement got under way, but his work was regarded as belonging to it in temper and outlook.

[58] Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section LXXIII, in The Drift of Romanticism (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:

“In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith. To such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel that life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless abyss. All their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the dull horror of the void.”

[59] I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry, 1926, p. 60.

[60] From Last Poems, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt and Company.

[61] I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry, Chapter VII.

[62] Richard Holt Hutton, Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p. 146.