It would seem that unfair and scant treatment of a country’s poetry could go no further. But if you will seek for information concerning American poetry you will find a deficiency which is even greater than that which marks the treatment of modern Swedish poetry.
Here again it might be in place to call attention to the hyperbolical claims on which the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ has been sold in America. In the flamboyant and unsubstantiable advertising of this reference work you will no doubt recall the claim: “It will tell you more about everything than you can get from any other source.” And perhaps you will also remember the statement: “The _Britannica_ is a complete _library_ of knowledge on every subject appealing to intelligent persons.” It may be, of course, that the editors believe that the subject of American literature does not, or at least should not, appeal to any but ignorant persons, and that, in fact, only middle-class English culture can possibly interest the intelligent. But unless such a belief can be proved to be correct, the American buyers of this Encyclopædia have a grave and legitimate complaint against the editors for the manner in which the books were foisted upon them. The _Encyclopædia Britannica_, as I have pointed out, is _not_ a complete library of knowledge on the subject of literature; and in the following pages I shall show that its gross inadequacy extends to many other very important fields of endeavor. Moreover, its incompleteness is most glaringly obvious in the field of American æsthetic effort—a field which, under the circumstances, should be the last to be neglected.
On the subject of American poetry it is deficient almost to the extreme of worthlessness. In the article, _American Literature_, written by George E. Woodberry, we discover that truly British spirit and viewpoint which regards nothing as worth while unless it is old or eminently respectable and accepted. The result is that, in the paragraph on our poetry, such men as Aldrich, Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder, Julia Ward Howe, H. H. Brownell and Henry Van Dyke are mentioned; but very few others. As a supreme surrender to modernity the names of Walt Whitman, Eugene Field, James Whitcomb Riley and Joaquin Miller are included. The great wealth of American poetry, which is second only to that of England, is not even suggested.