SOURCE: Wyatt, Edith. “James Whitcomb Riley.” In Great Companions, pp. 182-90. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1922.

In the following essay, Wyatt examines dialect in Riley's poetry and states that “music enters at the spaces left by all those hard g's and gutteral word-endings he cuts out so gracefully.”

In a delightful conversation quoted in an essay entitled “The Dusk of the Gods” in a recent Atlantic Monthly, George Moore says, “If there be a future for the English language, which I doubt, it is in America. A great deal of your speech is Elizabethan, and what is not you have invented. You are still inventing a language, while we have stopped; we take what additions foreigners and our savage subjects supply us, but that is all. Perhaps in America another language will arrive, adapted to literary usage … out of your slang, your dialects.”

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