POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
them very much. They are "types" of another kind than those used by the prose playwright. That is all. In attempting the universal, the poet achieves only the general—always colorless and cold. Only the specific is universal. In the genuine creation of character, the type takes care of itself. The truth, as Rodin says, is in the modeling.
When, however, we find American poets as capable of creating character as Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters have recently proved themselves, we have every reason to believe that there is in this country an abundance of power that is none the less in reserve, although still undiscovered. It is significant, also, that both these men, in their verse technique, have broken away from the stereotyped conventional metres, seeking inflections of rhythm in sympathy with internal necessity; and this is another indication of promise for the future of poetic drama.
The new order of playwrights will not give us pale imitations of Elizabethan blank verse. English blank verse may furnish the norm, as it has served Mr. Frost or Mr. Yeats, but the new rhythm of the poet playwrights will be a speech rhythm, direct, nervous, compact and individual. This, too, we may safely predicate, or at least this much. If we could predicate also that the new poetic play would not be literary, not a book play full of book speech, but a play based upon a sure instinct for dramatic values—and what is this instinct but a sense of the contrast, the light and shade of incident revealing character?—then indeed we could completely prophesy the play for which we are looking.
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