This hope gives us a convenient vantage from which to survey the situation, if we also keep in mind our perception of American cultural heterogeneity and the rashness of any attempt to generalize about it. The most exact but least diverting method would be the merely enumerative, the mere roll-call which would put before us Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound as the two of our poets whose public literary activities extend farthest back, and after them the group who made themselves known in the interval between 1914 and 1920: Mr. Robert Frost, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Masters, Mr. Sandburg, Miss Lowell, Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, Mr. Wallace Stevens, “H. D.,” Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Miss Sara Teasdale. These poets, with few exceptions, have little enough in common--nothing, perhaps, save the fact that they were all a good deal actuated at the outset by a disgust with the dead level of sentimentality and prettiness and moralism to which American poetry had fallen between 1890 and 1910. From that point they diverge like so many radii. One cannot say, as Miss Lowell has tried to persuade us, that they have all followed one radius, and that the differences between them are occasioned by the fact that some have gone farther than others. We may, for convenience, classify them, if we do not attach too much importance to the bounds of our classes. We may say that Mr. Robinson, Mr. Frost, and Mr. Masters bring back to our poetry a strong sense of reality; that Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Pound, Miss Lowell, “H. D.,” and Mr. Bodenheim bring to it a sharpened consciousness of colour; that Mr. Eliot, Mr. Kreymborg, and Mr. Stevens bring to it a refinement of psychological subtlety; Mr. Sandburg, a grim sense of social responsibility; Mr. Lindsay, a rhythmic abandon mixed with evangelism; Miss Teasdale, a grace. The range here indicated is extraordinary. The existence side by side in one generation and in one country of such poets as Mr. Masters and Mr. Fletcher, or Mr. Eliot and Miss Lowell, is anomalous. Clearly we are past that time when a nation will have at a given moment a single direct literary current. There is as yet no sign that to any one of these groups will fall anything like undivided sway. Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston” and Mr. Fletcher’s “Irradiations” came out in the same year; “Spoon River Anthology” and the first “Imagist Anthology”; Mr. Robinson’s “Lancelot” and Mr. Bodenheim’s “Advice.” And what gulfs even between members of any one of our arbitrary “classes”! Mr. Frost’s actualism is seldom far from the dramatic or lyric, that of Mr. Masters seldom far from the physiological. Mr. Masters is bitter-minded, tediously explanatory, and his passionate enquiries fall upon life like so many heavy blows; his delvings appear morbid as well as searching. Mr. Frost is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense of pain: if it is the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it,