After Whitman and Poe, Mr. Masters is by far the most original and
interesting of American poets. There is something Chaucerian about the
quizzical and whimsical manner in which he tells his brief and homely
stories. His characters are penetrated with the bleak and yet cheerful
tone of the "Middle West." Something quaint, humorous and astringent
emerges as their dominant note.

Mr. Masters has the massive ironical observation and the shrewd humane
wit of the great English novelists of the eighteenth century. His dead
people reveal "the true truth" of their sordid and troubled lives. The
little chances, the unguessed-at accidents, the undeserved blows of a
capricious destiny, which batter so many of us into helpless
inertness, are the aspects of life which interest him most.



26. THEODORE DREISER. THE TITAN.

Of all modern novelists Theodore Dreiser most entirely catches the
spirit of America. Here is the huge torrential stream of material
energies. Here are the men and women, so pushed and driven and parched
and bleached, by the enormous forces of industry and commerce, that
all distinction in them seems to be reduced to a strange
colorlessness; while the primordial animal cravings, greedy,
earth-born, fumble after their aims across the sad and littered stage
of sombre scenery.

There is something epic--something enormous and amorphous--like the