It is one of the peculiarities and, probably, weaknesses of modern American verse that so little of it is concerned in any significant way with New York life and that not one of its outstanding figures can be readily identified as a New York poet. This phenomenon is even more striking when one remembers that the changes in poetic practice instituted by Pound, Eliot, and their American successors had as a major objective the assimilation into English of the accomplishments of French verse from Baudelaire onwards. For much of the best poetry of the French school derives its strength from its profoundly serious, discriminating approach to metropolitan life—an approach which actually has little in common with Eliot's literary disenchantment with the modern world or Crane's imagistic use of the industrial scene or even Cummings's lyric “studies in decrepit life.”

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