In spite of the prejudice against American poetry as the manifestation of a chromium-plated, juke-box culture, the healthy state of American culture, he said, was one of the hopes of the world to-day. We too readily pass off that which is flashy as American, and claim that which is really good as a branch of English literature because both have a common heritage. Here is a new literature, influencing and moulding our own.

It began with Wait Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe. Emily Dickinson and Edward Arlington Robinson were also quoted. But with the little reviews it really largely developed. All the important poets first appeared here, and here received encouragement. Poetry Chicago, which Ezra Pound begun, and The Little Review, are the biggest of these. Most reviews were and still are parochial; there are hardly any with nationwide circulation.

Imagism, the first big movement, arose from discussions between Flint. H.D. (who is Hilda Doolittle), and Aldington. Pound for a while wrote under their banner. The imagists said to young writers, inter alia. "Don't be descriptive." "It is better to produce one image in a lifetime than volumes of works." Their ideas quickly wore out for Pound. There was a split in the fraternity, and Amy Lowell became the now prophet. A spell of "Amyism" ensued. The Catholic Review, which Pound was now editing, introduced Eliot; but Pound and Eliot played second fiddle to the poetry of Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg. American poetry was "pretty boggy." Joyce Kilmer was immortalised by "Trees"! There were some occasional good poems. This was a popular movement, but a retreat from life: a woolly pantheism when religious. To-day it is dated, and is considered degenerate. Johnson was distressed that Vachel Lind ray still regarded as the essence of modernism due to a queer sterness of his lines. . . . Pounds and Eliott were sterner and their workled to a flexling of the muscles of poetry.