We are not yet immune from the weakness of looking into the back pages to see what the other men have said; and on this occasion we received a salutary shock from the critic of the Detroit News, who informs us that Mr Aiken, ’despite the fact that he is one of the youngest and the newest, having made his debut less than four years ago, ... demonstrates ... that he is eminently capable of taking a solo part with Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Vachel Lindsay, and Edwin Arlington Robinson.’  The shock is two-fold.  In a single sentence we are in danger of being convicted of ignorance, and, where we can claim a little knowledge, we plead guilty; we know nothing of either Mr Oppenheim or Mr Robinson.  This very ignorance makes us cautious where we have a little knowledge We know something of Mr Lindsay, something of Mr Masters, and a good deal of Miss Lowell, who has long been a familiar figure in our anthologies of revolt; and we cannot understand on what principle they are assembled together.  Miss Lowell is, we are persuaded, a negligible poet, with a tenuous and commonplace impulse to write which she teases out into stupid ‘originalities.’  Of the other two gentlemen we have seen nothing which convinces us that they are poets, but also nothing which convinces us that they may not be.

Moreover, we can understand how Mr Aiken might be classed with them.  All three have in common what we may call creative energy.  They are all facile, all obviously eager to say something, though it is not at all obvious what they desire to say, all with an instinctive conviction that whatever it is it cannot be said in the old ways.  Not one of them produces the certainty that this conviction is really justified or that he has tested it; not one has written lines which have the doom ’thus and not otherwise’ engraved upon their substance; not one has proved that he is capable of addressing himself to the central problem of poetry, no matter what technique be employed—­how to achieve a concentrated unity of aesthetic impression.  They are all diffuse; they seem to be content to lead a hundred indecisive attacks upon reality at once rather than to persevere and carry a single one to a final issue; they are all multiple, careless, and slipshod—­and they are all interesting.

They are extremely interesting.  For one thing, they have all achieved what is, from whatever angle one looks at it, a very remarkable success.  Very few people, initiate or profane, can have opened Mr Lindsay’s ‘Congo’ or Mr Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology’ or Mr Aiken’s ’Jig of Forslin’ without being impelled to read on to the end.  That does not very often happen with readers of a book which professes to be poetry save in the case of the thronging admirers of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and their similars.  There is, however, another case more exactly in point, namely, that of Mr Kipling.  With Mr Kipling our three American poets have much in common, though the