In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

_I dwell in Possibility A fairer house than Prose, More numerous of windows Superior of doors._ EMILY DICKINSON a. Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both the fruit and the carrier of what I have called elsewhere "the great tradition. "[3] This tradition rose in the Mediterranean world with the will of Egypt, Israel and Greece, to re-create the individual and the group in the image of values called divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and when it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived in the Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With the Puritans, it was formally transplanted to the North American seaboard. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards; later, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, carried on the great tradition with the same tools, on the same intellectual and economic terms, that had been brought from Europe and that had failed in Europe. It was transplanted, it was not transfigured. But before the final defeat of the Puritan avatar-a defeat ensured by the disappearance of our agrarian economy-the great tradition had borne fruit in two general forms. The first was the ideological art of what Lewis Mumford calls the Golden Day: a prophetic art of poets so diverse as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, whose vision was one of Possibility and whose doom, since its premise was a disappearing world, was to remain suspended in the thin air of aspiration. The second was within the lives of the common people. Acceptance of the great tradition had its effect upon their character; and this humbler achievement is recorded, perhaps finally, in the poems of Robert Frost.

Frost's record ("North of Boston," 1914; "Mountain Interval," 1916) was already made when the United States entered the War; and the War brought final ruin to the American culture of "free" individuals living for the most part on farms, whose beauty Frost recorded. The tradition which had tempered the persons in Frost's poems had already, before the Civil War, sung its last high word in the old terms that were valid from Plato to Fichte. And this, too, was fitting, for the Civil War prepared the doom, which the World War completed, of the agrarian class culture. But the great tradition, unbroken from Hermes Trismegistus and Moses, does not die. In a society transfigured by new scientific and economic forces, it must be transfigured. The literature and philosophy of the past hundred years reveal many efforts at this transfiguration: in this common purpose, Nietzsche and Marx are brothers. The poetry of Whitman was still founded on the substances of the old order. The poetry of Hart Crane is a deliberate continuance of the great tradition in terms of our industrialized world.