"vob" in his vocabulary by his long contact with the North Germanic people.
All these things I relish and am familiar with; and yet, as I study my fourth volume of Mr. Sandburg's poems, I wonder why Mr. Untermeyer and the other fugelmen of the "movement" congratulate the public on the ease with which they may read and enjoy poetry, now that classical allusions and the traditional poetic diction have been banished. It is a sham and a delusion. Mr. Sandburg is not easy to read. He is as difficult in his own fashion as John Donne or Browning. If any of the men in my common smoker should glance over my shoulder at the pages before me, they would see abundance of familiar words: "taxi-drivers, "window-washers," "booze-runners," hat-cleaners," "delicatessen clerks." Perhaps also "shovel-stiffs," "work-plugs," "hoosegow," and "exhausted eggs heads" would be familiar to them. But I think they would gasp and stare at "sneaking scar-faced Nemesis," "miasmic" women, and "macabre" moons. I think they would meditate a long while before they felt any emotion whatever in the presence of such word patterns as:
Flick me, sting me, hold me even and smooth.
And I believe they might read the long title-poem, "Slabs of the Sunburnt West," twenty times without suspecting for a moment that it is a meditation
