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the light of psychological truth upon the literary ideals of Americanism. It is interesting to throw conflict that is waging around this ideal. Gustave Le Bon remarks in his latest book that "If it is difficult to understand the mentality of a people, this is because its literary, artistic and scientific productions, which reveal its intelligence, do not by any means interpret its character. Now, a man's behavior depends upon his character not upon his intellect, and there is no parallelism between these two regions of personality."

It is the superficial belief of some critics that "American" poetry has its ideal and embodiment in Walt Whitman. It has been impossible for them to distinguish the fact that Whitman was only a rebel in form and not in ideas and substance. His radicalism consisted in breaking up forms merely as a chemical process to hold and shape the new solutions of his ideas of American democracy. This process was in keeping with the evolutionary tradition of the Saxon peoples. Whitman was not then a revolutionist, as so many of his non-Saxon disciples of to-day believe. In our current art it is very easily determined by name those poets whose art express evolutionary principles of substance and ideas and those who express revolutionary social doctrines. The question of form scarcely matters; for though Masters, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, John Gould Fletcher, John Hall Wheelock, and H. D., to name a few of the best, are often radical in form, in substance they carry on the evolutionary principle of the Saxon traditions. Add Frost, Robinson and Aiken, to their names and you get the Saxon continuity of poetic spirit. How much or how little you may like their themes or their qualities of vision, these poets are constructive. Now, the revolutionists tumble out of the category of this Saxon nomenclature. Sandburg, Oppenheim, Untermeyer, Giovannitti, Rosenfeld, and the increasing number of Russian

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