Off with the fetters That chafe and restrain! Off with the chain! Here Art and Letters, Music and Wine And Myrtle and Wanda, The winsome witches, Blithely combine. Here is Golconda, Here are the Indies, Here we are free— Free as the wind is, Free as the sea, Free!
Free for what? one asks doggedly. Hovey does not answer directly, but with unflagging buoyancy, whipped up by scorn for the smug ones, he continues:
I tell you that we, While you are smirking And lying and shirking Life’s duty of duties, Honest sincerity, We are in verity Free! Free to rejoice In blisses and beauties! Free as the voice Of the wind as it passes! Free ... _etc._
Free, one concludes, to dwell with Music and Wine, Myrtle and Wanda, Art and Letters. Free, in short, to follow, with a more athletic energy, the same ideals as the parlor-poets they gibed so relentlessly. And the new insurgence triumphed. It was the heartiness, the gypsy jollity, the rush of high spirits that conquered. Readers of the _Vagabondia_ books were swept along by their speed faster than by their philosophy.
The enthusiastic acceptance of these new apostles of outdoor vigor was, however, not as much of an accident as it seemed. On one side, the world of art, the public was wearied by barren philosophizing set to tinkling music; on the other, the world of action, it was faced by a staggering growth of materialism which it feared. Hovey, Carman and their imitators offered a swift and stirring way out. But it was neither an effectual nor a permanent escape. The war with Spain, the industrial turmoil, the growth of social consciousness and new ideas of responsibility made America look for fresh valuations, more searching songs. Hovey began to go deeper into himself and his age; in the mid-West, William Vaughn Moody grappled with the problems of his times only to have his work cut short by death in 1910. But these two were exceptions; in the main, it was another interval—two decades of appraisal and expectancy, of pause and preparation.
This interval of about twenty years was notable for its effort to treat the spirit of the times with a cheerful evasiveness, a humorous unconcern; its most representative craftsmen were, with four exceptions, the writers of light verse. These four exceptions were Richard Hovey, Bliss Carman, William Vaughn Moody and Edwin Markham. Both Hovey (in his _Along the Trail_ and his modernization of _Launcelot_ and _Guenevere_, a poetic drama in five books) and Carman (in his later poems like _Songs of the Sea Children_) saw wider horizons and tuned their instruments to a larger music.