Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/70

52 Later Poets His poems on serious themes lack the delightftd assurance of The Wander-Lovers and Spring. The Call of the Bugles, one of his several Spanish War poems, is only intermittently buoy- ant and martial, is too long, and is scarcely American in its sentiment ' ' Great is war — great and fair ! " In a rarer mood of Hovey's is Unmanijest Destiny, in which, as in Seaward, his elegy on the death of Thomas William Parsons, his tone is impressively reverent and his music richly solemn. Another Columbia University poet of latter-day New York was the accompHshed Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916), professor of graphics, an ardent philatelist and collector of book-plates, author of Madrigals and Catches (1887), Lyrics for a Lute ( 1 890) , Little Folk Lyrics ( 1 892) , and Lyrics of Joy ( 1 904) . The titles indicate of themselves the poetic genres to which he devoted himself. Whether he dealt with love, or nature, or books, his lines were short and jocund. His range was narrow, and quite out of the modem current ; but his love of music and image were so genuine that his poems reached a cordial if small audience. This brings us to the poetry of the West. The poets of the East are, in one sense, a survival from the past ; in another sense, a bridge leading from the past into the future. The West, on the other hand, having the initiative, the irreverence, and the breezy optimism of a new country, set about creating a litera- ture fashioned in its own image. If that image was unbeautiful, it was at least sturdy and forward-looking. At times the West did not hesitate to use the past, but its own force nearly always gave the past a new direction. It was this element of novelty that delighted ordinary readers even in the conservative East and caused England to find in Western poetry, as it found in Whitman, the authentic voice of the New World at last be- ginning to express itself: Nothing of Europe here — Or, then, of Europe fronting mbrnward still. For this hasty generalization there is some semblance of justi- fication, since, after all, as Professor Turner has shown im- pressively, all of the United States save the Atlantic seaboard has at some time been a democratic West in opposition to an aristocratic East. And yet, if the West was not a fixed region.