What refuge we have from a critical basis so naïve is in assuming from the outset, toward contemporary American poetry, an attitude guardedly pluralistic--we begin by observing merely that American poetry is certainly, at the moment, if quantitative production and public interest are any measure, extraordinarily healthy and vigorous. We are accustomed to hearing it called a renaissance. The term is admissible if we carefully exclude, in using it, any implication of a revival of classicism. What we mean by it is simply that the moment is one of quite remarkable energy, productiveness, range, colour, and anarchy. What we do not mean by it is that we can trace with accuracy where this outburst comes from. The origins of the thing are obscure. It was audible in 1914--Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound were audible before that; it burst into full chorus in 1915; and ever since there has been, with an occasional dying fall, a lusty corybantic cacophony. Just where this amazing procession started nobody clearly knows. Mr. Untermeyer would have us believe that Walt Whitman was, as it were, the organizer of it, Miss Monroe tries to persuade us that it was _Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_, But the facts, I think, wave aside either postulate. If one thing is remarkable it is that in this spate of poetry the influence of Walt Whitman--an influence, one would suppose, as toxic for the young as Swinburne--is so inconsiderable: if another is even more remarkable, it is that in all this chorus one so seldom hears a voice of which any previous American voice was the clear prototype. We have had, of course, our voices--of the sort, I mean, rich enough in character to make imitation an easy and tempting thing. Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Sill, Lanier are not in this regard considerable,--but what of Poe, whose influence we have seen in French poetry on Baudelaire, and in contemporary English poetry on Mr. Walter de la Mare? No trace of him is discoverable, unless perhaps we find the ghostliest of his shadows now and then across the work of Mr. John Gould Fletcher, or Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, or Mr. Wallace Stevens, a shadow cast, in all these cases, amid much else, from a technical and colouristic standpoint, which would have filled Poe with alarm. And there is another American poet, perhaps as great as Poe, perhaps greater (as he in turn is perhaps greater than Whitman--as poet, though not as personality)--Emily Dickinson. Of that quietist and mystic, who walked with tranquillity midway between Blake and Emerson, making of her wilful imperfections a kind of perfectionism, why do we hear so little? Do we catch now and again the fleetingest glimpse of her in the early work of Mr. Robert Frost? If so, it is certainly nowhere else. Yet it would be hard to prove that she has no right to a place with Poe and Whitman, or indeed among the best poets in the language.