A Critical Fable

Author : Amy Lowell
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781530648696
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (486 download)

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Download or read book A Critical Fable written by Amy Lowell and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-20 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1847 a young man in Cambridge, Mass., named James Russell Lowell, wrote a merry but wise skit, called "A Fable for Critics," which hit off the literary lights of his day. The first edition was issued anonymously. Now somebody, who seems at least familiar with Cambridge, Mass., has written "A Critical Fable", which pays Lowell the compliment of imitation, even to the rhymed title page, and hits off the poets of to-day. Lowell's Fable made considerable of a stir in its generation. We wonder if this one will imitate it in that-respect? Lowell's made a stir because it had something pungent to say about Bryant and Longfellow and Emerson (who built glorious temples but left "never a doorway to get in a god"), and Whittier and Hawthorne and Cooper and Holmes and Irving and Lowell himself, not to mention the then American trick of kowtowing to England and other matters of Some moment. The 1922 Fable has something not quite so pungent to say about Robert Frost and Amy Lowell and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay and certain other present-day poets (it omits all philosophers and other prose writers). But we cannot help wondering whether it will reach the audience Lowell's did-not because it is considerably less pungent, less witty, less wise, but because, probably, Frost, Robinson, Fletcher, Lindsay, Sandburg, Amy Lowell, mean far less to the America of to-day than Longfellow, Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Holmes, Whittier and Jimmie Lowell meant to the America of 1847. IS THAT because they are inferior as writers? Or is it because we care less as a people for poetry? Or is it because modern civilization has speeded up till there is a vast diversity of interests, and one has to divide his excitement between poetry, the coal strike and a balky carburetor? A character in the new Fable is the ghost of Lowell himself, wandering by the Charles River embankment, where the author encounters him and tries to explain why the new generation prefers his great-grandniece Amy to himself (if she is his great-grandniece, and if they do). Coming to the case of Robert Frost, the author of the new Fable says some caustic things about the university which pays Frost a good salary to live on its campus and provide inspirational atmosphere. He thinks this keeps Frost from creative work (as, apparently, it does), and so is to be deplored. Well, well! one cannot help reflecting that James Russell Lowell was a professor at Harvard as well as a mere Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and yet managed to create a considerable body of tolerably effective literature, including the "Bigelow Papers" and the "Commemoration Ode." One reflects that Longfellow was a professor in a college. One reflects that Bryant edited a metropolitan newspaper. One reflects that Holmes was a professor in a medical school. One reflects that Emerson was a Lyceum lecturer, in the days when barnstorming was no light task. They didn't have to creep off into ivory towers to create. They didn't want to. What they wrote may not fit the needs of to-day, but it challenged their own generation, certainly, and it did so because they were intensely of their generation and big enough to forge their literature out of its active life. They had size. -The Judge, Vol. 83 [1922]