into eternity. when over my head a shooting star Bur s (t into a stale shriek like an alarm-clock) [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. _Our Critical Spokesmen_ GORHAM B. MUNSON “Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my table, “aims to _be_ something; while criticism aims first to clarify and then to _value_ something. Criticism is talk _about_ something with a view to passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the state of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and in vogue, and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of consciousness of life’s processes and meanings which is current in this period.” “So,” I remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about has some importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle, that of valuing, and it assists in indicating the range and depth and intensity of his awareness of life.”