a strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, `There is no excellent beauty
without strangeness.'"

This recognition from the distinguished Irish poet tempts me to hint
at the cosmopolitan aspects of such racily local art as Mr. Lindsay's.
The subject is too large for a merely introductory word,
but the reader may be invited to reflect upon it. If Mr. Lindsay's poetry
should cross the ocean, it would not be the first time
that our most indigenous art has reacted upon the art of older nations.
Besides Poe -- who, though indigenous in ways too subtle for brief analysis,
yet passed all frontiers in his swift, sad flight -- the two American artists
of widest influence, Whitman and Whistler, have been intensely American
in temperament and in the special spiritual quality of their art.

If Whistler was the first great artist to accept the modern message
in Oriental art, if Whitman was the first great modern poet
to discard the limitations of conventional form: if both were more free,
more individual, than their contemporaries, this was
the expression of their Americanism, which may perhaps be defined
as a spiritual independence and love of adventure inherited from the pioneers.
Foreign artists are usually the first to recognize this new tang;
one detects the influence of the great dead poet and dead painter
in all modern art which looks forward instead of back;
and their countrymen, our own contemporary poets and painters,
often express indirectly, through French influences,
a reaction which they are reluctant to confess directly.

A lighter phase of this foreign enthusiasm for the American tang
is confessed by Signor Marinetti, the Italian "futurist",
when in his article on `Futurism and the Theatre', in `The Mask',