THE BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

26 November 1913

(page 19)

The Listener

What does it matter if the longest paper in the latest issue after Mr. Zangwill’s on the militant suffragist is a diatribe against “Art in America”? In this tirade (the author of which, one Aleister Crowley, whoever that may be modestly remarks that “everybody knows that I have never really grown up).” Longfellow is set down as a “pop-gun loaded with pop-corn”; Bryant is, on the whole, even more spectacled than Longfellow; and Whittier is little better than Moody and Sankey. Whitman is, of course, the only fitting representative American, “the real things, the spirit of the new continent made word”—and this expressly because he is “raw, untutored, tameless, crude, the America of the War. I have lived on the prairie myself and I recognize the note.” The article abounds in errors in history, fact, reasoning and grammar. But not being worth talking about, why talk about it?