Indeed, it was the spirit of Whitman, more than any other, that presided over our “poetic renascence.” Not, of course, that all the poets who made their appearance in those years were akin to him. Frost, for instance, was hardly more like Whitman than he was like Pope; consciously, in his living and in his poetry, he was facing and he has continued to move in just the opposite direction. Nor perhaps in the work of Masters or of Robinson[57] is the relation to Whitman at once apparent, for superficially neither the _Spoon River Anthology_, that sardonic record of stunted human growths, nor Robinson’s sombre studies of the thwarted lives of his New Englanders suggest the tolerance, the breadth and human warmth of the older poet’s sympathies. But the analysis of these unfortunate victims of a repressive and unhumane morality (for such is the way the poetry of both writers was commonly described, and such, in one aspect, it is) was really in line with Whitman’s gospel of emotional emancipation, as well as with the new direction given to psychology by Freud and Jung. In the work of Lindsay and Sandburg, and notably in that of the far less original Oppenheim (whose disappearance from current collections is itself significant of the change that has taken place), the influence of Whitman was patent. All the spokesmen and contemporary critics of the movement, from Amy Lowell (1917) to Bruce Weirick (1924), with varying degrees of emphasis, stress Whitman’s primacy in American literature. He had had his lovers and disciples before, but now for the first time a group of American poets could give him whole-hearted welcome with no inner abashment to overcome. Throughout the earlier productions of the movement, even in the poems of the Imagists, whose theory and practice of verse were so different from his own, is diffused the vibrant spirit of Walt Whitman. It is experienced as a certain buoyancy and expectancy of mood, and most characteristically as an underlying trust in a life-force which is felt to be working here in America to high, unforeseen ends.