Suddenly the “new” poetry burst upon us with unexpected vigor and extraordinary variety. Moody and Markham were its immediate forerunners; Whitman its godfather. October, 1912, saw the first issue of _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, a monthly that was to introduce the work of hitherto unknown poets and to herald, with an eager impartiality, the various groups, schools and “movements.” The magazine came at the very moment before the breaking of the storm. Flashes and rumblings had already been troubling the literary heavens; a few months later—the deluge! For three years the skies continued to discharge such strange and divergent phenomena as Vachel Lindsay’s _General William Booth Enters into Heaven_ (1913), James Oppenheim’s _Songs for the New Age_ (1914), the first anthology of _The Imagists_ (1914), _Challenge_ (1914), Amy Lowell’s _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ (1914), Lindsay’s _The Congo and Other Poems_ (1914), Robert Frost’s _North of Boston_ (1914), Edgar Lee Master’s _Spoon River Anthology_ (1915), John Gould Fletcher’s _Irradiations_ (1915), Carl Sandburg’s _Chicago Poems_ (1916). By 1917, the “new” poetry was ranked as “America’s first national art”; its success was sweeping, its sales unprecedented. People who never before had read verse, turned to it and found they could not only read but relish it. They discovered that for the enjoyment of poetry it was not necessary to have at their elbows a dictionary of rare words and classical references; they no longer were required to be acquainted with Latin legendry and the minor love-affairs of the major Greek divinities. Life was their glossary, not literature. The new product spoke to them in their own language. And it did more: it spoke to them of what they had scarcely ever heard expressed; it was not only closer to their soil but nearer their souls. ROBINSON AND MASTERS One reason why the new poetry achieved so sudden a success was its freedom from the traditionally stilted “poetic diction.” Revolting strongly against the assumption that poetry must have a vocabulary of its own, the poets of the new era spoke in the oldest and most stirring tongue; they used a language that was the language not of the poetasters but of the people. In the tones of ordinary speech they rediscovered the strength, the dignity, the divine core of the commonplace.