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A Commentary by Aleksis Rannit 21 The story is well known. After the Victorian Age/Belle Epoque/Art Nouveau's failures and triumphs—after the flowery adjectives, poeticisms, the conversion of taste for sound and verbal rhythm into decorative patterns of high-flavored melodious verse, into a strange mixture of the sensual and the partially mystical or merely mystifying, after Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Mallarmé, and young Rilke—came revulsion. Even the Expressionists (who largely intensified and dramatized the Impressionists' colorisi cleanness, rendering their play of light and syllables less fluidly and often purely graphically) rejected previous achievements and tried to return to primitive or neo-medieval form. Together with the Cubists and the Futurists, they proclaimed as holy the abstractness of hard edges and sudden sharp contrasts, now ascendant over the chromatic beauty and harmonic technique of the past. Established aesthetics collapsed, and after the First World War the way was open to the refined individualist T. S. Eliot and to Eliotism, abjuring all Romanticism and even ignoring its existence. Two options were left: first, to follow Eliot and his associates in intellectualizing and pseudo-intellectualizing poetry to the point of becoming barren of feeling. Was, and is, the final aim of this school to perform a ritual of subtle sterilization of the word? Even if not, many American and English poets began to write predominantly for academic critics and some of them still do, cultivating a stiff dryness, an antimusicality , a snobbery of nihilism and of the manneristically unnatural. Or there was the other, more organic possibility: to remember Burns, Hardy, and Housman, especially Housman, in whose poetry poignantly personal feeling was embodied in "simple" verse of considerable sophistication and richness of classical association. This second line of versemakers, which later produced Robert Frost, James Still, and Robert Francis, was and is in the minority, although it looks to me that exactly these and similar poets will probably lose little in the next century, since they stand above epoch, above sensationalism and thus provisional contemporaneity . A minority, perhaps, but a remarkable one: Philip Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Spencer Brown, Langston Hughes (his pure lyrics, not his journalistic or political poems), Edgar Lee Masters (excluding his late pessimistic and cynical poems), William Meredith. At the end of his line may be found the skeletal excellence of the poetry of James Laughlin and James L. Weil—skeletal, yes, but not stillborn. This is a company of people whose poetry does not renounce tonality, though it renounces the obtrusive musicalization, even the individualistic synthesis, of mere tunefulness. They did not cultivate an increasing selfconsciousness of being original; they did not accentuate the need for every poem to be a universe unto itself. Theirs was a classical bearing of genuine modesty and willing restraint, personal and artistic. They have chosen (and James Still, the "simple" laborer of art, does it convincingly ) an unforced way, a thread that allows one poetic thought to follow naturally upon another, the many virtues of moderation. Here, technical skill, at one with the naivete of a peasant-worker poet-craftsman, is patent. Sovereign ease of writing, learning lightly worn, happiness in remaining within certain conventions or at least not straying too far from them, the habit of not being afraid to please the general reader—this is what we may call Still's "classical" attitude. He possesses the art of making his poetry seem familiar, and thus, despite some contrapuntal refinements, he becomes popular and pleasing to many readers. As an authentic biological talent, James Still has achieved a germinating unity in his poems, and his best pieces calmly summarize his life as work, while mirroring his inborn feelings for the Appalachian landscape, for him: the landscape of inwardness. Born poor, he remains a harmonious, forgiving, and grateful man. He does not accuse anybody or complain and cry even when he suggests the tragic life of his Appalachian folk. The sense of style and the craftsman's skill by which he often surpasses his models are 22 most plainly revealed in writing born of contact with life rather than with books. In so many of his poems he has spoken for the people; here it is the people...

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