Prejudices, first seriesMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
History
Prejudices, first series
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
American essays -- 20th century; American literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- History and criticism
Miss Lowell is the schoolmarm of the movement, and vastly more the
pedagogue than the artist. She has written perhaps half a dozen
excellent pieces in imitation of Richard Aldington and John Gould
Fletcher, and a great deal of highfalutin bathos. Her “A Dome of
Many-Colored Glass” is full of infantile poppycock, and though it is
true that it was first printed in 1912, before she joined the Imagists,
it is not to be forgotten that it was reprinted with her consent in
1915, after she had definitely set up shop as a foe of the _cliché_. Her
celebrity, I fancy, is largely extra-poetical; if she were Miss Tilly
Jones, of Fort Smith, Ark., there would be a great deal less rowing
about her, and her successive masterpieces would be received less
gravely. A literary craftsman in America, as I have already said once or
twice, is never judged by his work alone. Miss Lowell has been helped
very much by her excellent social position. The majority, and perhaps
fully nine-tenths of the revolutionary poets are of no social position
at all—newspaper reporters, Jews, foreigners of vague nationality,
school teachers, lawyers, advertisement writers, itinerant lecturers,
Greenwich Village posturers, and so on. I have a suspicion that it has
subtly flattered such denizens of the _demi-monde_ to find the sister of
a president of Harvard in their midst, and that their delight has
materially corrupted their faculties. Miss Lowell’s book of exposition,
“Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” is commonplace to the last
degree. Louis Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” is very much
better. And so is Prof. Dr. John Livingston Lowes’ “Convention and
Revolt in Poetry.”
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