Life — July 6, 1922 — page 7: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "American Poets Illustrated in the French Manner" This page presents four illustrated literary quotations in an art nouveau/decorative style. Each pairs a famous American poem with a French-influenced drawing: 1. **"Thanatopsis"** (William Cullen Bryant) — shows a reclining woman communing with nature 2. **"Maud Muller"** (John Greenleaf Whittier) — depicts a woman raking hay in a pastoral scene 3. **"Excelsior"** (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) — shows a man in evening dress at a doorway 4. **"The Heritage"** (James Russell Lowell) — illustrates two figures at a dining table with wine The satire appears to mock the fashionable adoption of French artistic aesthetics in American culture. By dressing quintessentially American romantic poetry in elaborate, decorative French illustration style, the page humorously comments on American cultural pretension and the era's Francophilia among educated classes.